Westminster, Colorado: The City That Castle Built
Near Boulder, Colorado
Westminster, Colorado, grew up in the shadow of the castle on the hill. The area's first permanent settler arrived in eighteen seventy, a Kentucky farmer named Pleasant DeSpain who planted orchards along the creek. After the Denver, Western and Pacific Railway arrived in eighteen eighty-one, the settlement began to grow as a fruit-shipping point.
In eighteen ninety-two, the red sandstone tower that became Westminster Castle rose on the hill above, intended as the core of a Presbyterian university. The university failed after World War One. The area took the university's name, Westminster, in nineteen oh eight, and the town incorporated in nineteen eleven.
Today the city has grown to over a hundred thousand people, one of the larger suburban communities on the north Denver Front Range, but the castle still rises above it all.
