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Colorado Counties

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Colorado Counties

Colorado currently has sixty-four counties. The Counties of Colorado are important components of government since the state has no secondary civil subdivisions such as townships. Two counties, the City and County of Denver and the City and County of Broomfield, have consolidated city and county governments.. No organized Counties of the District of Louisiana, the Territory of Missouri, or the Territory of Nebraska existed within the present boundaries of the State of Colorado.

Crowley County, Colorado

Crowley County History, Geography, Demographics, Cities and Towns, and Education

Crowley County is one of the 64 counties of the State of Colorado of the United States. The county population was 5,518 at US Census 2000. The county seat is Ordway.

County Seat: Ordway
Year Organized: 1911
Square Miles: 789

Court House:

110 E 6th Street
County Courthouse
Ordway, CO 81063-1043

Etymology - Origin of County Name

The county was named for John H. Crowley, senator from Otero County to the state legislature at the time of the split.

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

County History

Crowley County was created by the Colorado legislature on May 29, 1911 out of the northern portions of Otero County, previously both were parts of Bent County. The county was named for John H. Crowley, senator from Otero County to the state legislature at the time of the split. Its original inhabitants decades earlier were native Americans, more Cheyenne than other tribes at the time the western expansion of the US arrived.

The first significant development and settlement occurred in 1887 when the Missouri Pacific Railroad came through from the east, on its way to Pueblo and Colorado's rich gold fields of the "Pikes Peak Or Bust" Colorado Gold Rush.

The county seat is in Ordway, a town established in 1890 that quickly became the economic hub of the area. Other towns still existing along the Missouri Pacific Railroad's route are Sugar City, Crowley, Olney Springs, and Pultney.

A few years later, developers brought a canal east from the Arkansas River, with ambitious plans to irrigate a million acres (4000 km²) in Kansas; instead, the canal petered out in Crowley County but did irrigate 57,000 acres (230 km²) along its length. This turned early Crowley County into a lush agricultural mecca...at first.

By the 1970s almost all the water rights were sold from what is now called the Twin Lakes Canal to the fast-growing cities of Colorado's Front Range corridor. The area's economic activity has shifted toward ranching. Much of the land has returned to its original sparse prairie grassland conditions.

Crowley County also today hosts a state prison. The 2000 census showed 5,518 county residents, of which 1,955 were prisoners, giving Crowley County the highest percentage of incarcerated prisoners of any county in the US

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 800 square miles (2,073 km²), of which, 789 square miles (2,043 km²) of it is land and 11 square miles (29 km²) of it (1.42%) is water.

Neighboring Counties:

Northeast: Lincoln County
East: Kiowa County
South: Otero County
Southwest: Pueblo County
Northwest: El Paso County

Cities and Towns:

- Crowley	town	Incorporated Area
- Olney Springs	town	Incorporated Area
- Ordway (County Seat)	town	Incorporated Area
- Sugar City	town	Incorporated Area

County Resources:

Enter County Resources and Information Here

County Resources

The history of our nation was a prolonged struggle to define the relative roles and powers of our governments: federal, state, and local. And the names given the counties, our most locally based jurisdictions, reflects the "characteristic features of this country!"

But age, size and colorful names of our counties isn't the only reason to explore counties' role in American history, or the history of county government itself. In fact, the story of county government reflects the larger meanings of American history.

Today's counties are the most flexible, locally responsive and creative governments in the US. They are the most diverse, varying in size, population, geography, and governmental structure. In their politics and policies, they express a 1990's political slogan "Think globally, act locally."