Wiggins: Named for a Fremont Scout

The town of Wiggins, Colorado started out as a Burlington Railroad depot called Corona in eighteen eighty-two, one of several water and service stops laid across the South Platte valley. Around nineteen hundred, residents renamed it for Oliver P. Wiggins, a frontiersman who had served as a scout and guide for Captain John C. Fremont on his explorations through northern Colorado in the eighteen forties and reportedly spent twelve years riding with Kit Carson.

The surrounding land became Morgan County sugar beet country. By nineteen twenty-nine, nearly twenty thousand acres of beets were under cultivation in the county, and communities like Wiggins served as shipping and supply points for the harvest. The town today remains a compact agricultural stop on Interstate Seventy-Six, its name honoring a man who crossed this same stretch of the South Platte valley nearly a century before the railroad arrived.