Denver, Pennsylvania
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
There is a Denver in Pennsylvania, and it is considerably older than the one in Colorado. The land here in Lancaster County was first settled in seventeen thirty-five by Hans Bucher, a Swiss immigrant, who called it Bucher's Thal, meaning Bucher Valley in German. The place drifted along under various names for over a century until December of eighteen sixty-three, when a new railroad station opened on the Columbia to Reading line.
The station was first known as Union Station, and the town was officially renamed Denver in eighteen eighty-one. Where that name came from is not firmly documented. The borough itself was not formally incorporated until December of nineteen hundred.
Its early industries included hats, textiles, cigars, and shoes, and by the early twentieth century the hat factories here supplied customers far beyond Lancaster County.
