City History
From Palmer’s utopia to military city to the fastest-growing metro in Colorado
General William Jackson Palmer founded Colorado Springs on July 31, 1871. Palmer was a Civil War hero — a Union cavalry officer who received the Medal of Honor for his actions at Red Hill, Alabama — and a railroad builder who constructed the Denver & Rio Grande Railway to connect Denver to the southern Rockies and eventually Mexico. He chose the site at the base of Pikes Peak deliberately: he envisioned a planned, orderly resort community that would attract wealthy Eastern tourists and settlers seeking the mountain air.
Palmer’s vision was specific and unusual for the frontier. He platted wide boulevards, reserved land for parks, and established strict building codes. He banned saloons from the original townsite (earning the city its early nickname, “Little London”), though the neighboring town of Colorado City — later annexed — had plenty. He donated land for Colorado College (founded 1874) and invested in infrastructure that most Western towns wouldn’t see for decades.
William Jackson Palmer (Wikipedia) · Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum
Pikes Peak (14,115 feet) had been a landmark for explorers since Zebulon Pike first sighted it in 1806, but Palmer turned it into a tourism engine. The Pikes Peak Cog Railway opened in 1891, carrying visitors to the summit where Katharine Lee Bates was inspired to write America the Beautiful in the summer of 1893. The song’s opening line — “O beautiful for spacious skies” — describes the view from the top of Pikes Peak looking east across the Great Plains.
Colorado Springs marketed itself as a health destination. The dry, high-altitude climate was believed to be beneficial for tuberculosis patients, and by the 1890s the city had dozens of tuberculosis sanitariums. Patients came from across the country, and the sanitarium industry became a significant part of the local economy. The city’s population grew from 4,226 in 1880 to 21,085 by 1900, driven by a mix of health tourism, the railroad, and the region’s natural beauty.
Pikes Peak (Wikipedia) · America the Beautiful (Wikipedia) · Pioneers Museum
In 1891, a cowboy named Bob Womack discovered gold in Cripple Creek, about 25 miles southwest of Colorado Springs. The discovery triggered the last great gold rush in the American West. By 1900, the Cripple Creek Mining District was producing more gold than any other district in the United States — roughly $20 million per year (over $700 million in today’s dollars). At its peak, the district had 475 mines and a population of 50,000.
The gold didn’t stay in Cripple Creek. The wealth flowed downhill to Colorado Springs, where mine owners built mansions along North Cascade Avenue and Wood Avenue in what became known as Millionaires’ Row. Colorado Springs briefly had more millionaires per capita than any city in the United States. The gold money funded civic institutions, churches, and the infrastructure that transformed the town from a small resort into a genuine city.
Spencer Penrose made his fortune in Cripple Creek gold and Utah copper, then poured it back into Colorado Springs. His most enduring creation is the Broadmoor Hotel, which opened on June 29, 1918. Penrose modeled it after the grand hotels of Europe, building a pink stucco Italian Renaissance resort on the shores of Cheyenne Lake at the base of Cheyenne Mountain. The Broadmoor has operated continuously for over a century and remains one of the most prestigious resort hotels in the world, holding a Five-Star rating from Forbes Travel Guide for a record 65 consecutive years.
Penrose also built the Pikes Peak Highway (1915), the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo (1926), and the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun (1937). In 1920, he purchased Garden of the Gods and donated it to the city with the stipulation that it remain free and open to the public forever — a condition the city honors to this day. The 1,341-acre park, with its dramatic red sandstone formations, draws more than 2 million visitors annually.
Spencer Penrose (Wikipedia) · The Broadmoor (Wikipedia) · Garden of the Gods (Wikipedia)
World War II transformed Colorado Springs from a resort town into a military city. Camp Carson (now Fort Carson) was established in 1942 on 60,000 acres south of the city, named for the frontier scout Kit Carson. At its wartime peak, the post housed over 42,000 soldiers training for combat in North Africa and Europe. The camp also held 9,000 Axis prisoners of war — German and Italian soldiers who worked on local farms and construction projects.
Peterson Field (now Peterson Space Force Base) opened in 1942 as an Army Air Corps base for bomber and fighter training. After the war, both installations were scaled back but never closed, and when the Cold War escalated, they expanded dramatically. The military presence brought thousands of permanent residents, defense contractors, and federal dollars that fundamentally reshaped the city’s economy.
In 1954, Congress authorized the creation of the United States Air Force Academy, and after a nationwide site competition, Colorado Springs was selected. The Academy opened in 1958 on a spectacular 18,500-acre campus north of the city, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Its iconic Cadet Chapel (1962), with 17 soaring aluminum spires, became one of the most recognizable examples of modernist architecture in America. The Academy graduates roughly 1,000 officers per year and has produced astronauts, generals, and two secretaries of defense.
The same Cold War logic that brought the Academy brought NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). In 1961, the military began hollowing out Cheyenne Mountain to build a blast-resistant command center capable of surviving a nuclear attack. The Cheyenne Mountain Complex opened in 1966, buried under 2,000 feet of granite, designed to coordinate the air and missile defense of North America. Though NORAD’s primary operations moved to nearby Peterson in 2008, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex remains operational as a backup command center. Together, the Academy and NORAD cemented Colorado Springs’s identity as a military city — the largest concentration of military installations and defense infrastructure in the Interior West.
USAFA (Wikipedia) · Cheyenne Mountain (Wikipedia) · NORAD (Wikipedia)
In 1991, James Dobson moved Focus on the Family — one of the most influential evangelical organizations in the United States — from Pomona, California to Colorado Springs. The move was not random: Colorado Springs offered a conservative, military-friendly culture, low costs, and a receptive community. Focus on the Family built an 81-acre campus on the north side of the city and at its peak employed over 1,300 people locally.
Focus was not alone. Throughout the 1990s, a cluster of major evangelical and conservative organizations established headquarters in Colorado Springs: the International Bible Society, the Navigators, the Association of Christian Schools International, Compassion International, and Young Life, among others. By the late 1990s, Colorado Springs had earned the label “Evangelical Vatican” in national media. The concentration of religious organizations shaped local politics, school board elections, and the city’s national reputation for a generation.
In November 1992, Colorado voters passed Amendment 2, a state constitutional amendment that prohibited any city, town, or county from enacting anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation. The measure was largely driven by organizations based in Colorado Springs, including Colorado for Family Values, and was widely seen as a direct response to anti-discrimination ordinances passed in Aspen, Boulder, and Denver.
Amendment 2 made Colorado a national flashpoint in the culture wars. Gay rights organizations launched a boycott of the state, and the amendment was challenged in court. The case, Romer v. Evans, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down Amendment 2 in 1996 in a 6–3 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy’s majority opinion declared that Amendment 2 violated the Equal Protection Clause because it singled out a specific group of people and denied them the ability to seek legal protection. The decision became a landmark in LGBTQ+ civil rights law and laid the groundwork for subsequent rulings including Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).
The episode defined Colorado Springs’s national image for years — rightly or wrongly — as a bastion of religious conservatism hostile to LGBTQ+ rights. That reputation has softened considerably in the 2020s as the city has diversified, but it remains part of the city’s contested identity.
Amendment 2 (Wikipedia) · Romer v. Evans (Wikipedia) · CPR News
Colorado Springs learned the cost of building a city at the wildland-urban interface when two catastrophic wildfires struck in consecutive years. The Waldo Canyon Fire ignited on June 23, 2012, and on June 26 it made a dramatic run down the mountains into the city’s northwest neighborhoods. The fire destroyed 347 homes in the Mountain Shadows subdivision, killed 2 people, and forced the evacuation of 32,000 residents. It was the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history at the time.
One year later, the Black Forest Fire (June 2013) broke out northeast of the city and destroyed 489 homes, surpassing Waldo Canyon’s record. Two people died. The back-to-back disasters forced a citywide reckoning with fire mitigation, building codes in fire-prone areas, and the reality that climate change and drought were making the wildfire threat permanent, not occasional.
The fires also revealed the limitations of Colorado Springs’s revenue model. Under TABOR (Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights), the city could not raise taxes without voter approval, and years of lean budgets had left the fire department understaffed. The disasters accelerated a political shift toward investment in public safety that would culminate in the strong-mayor charter change and subsequent tax measures.
Waldo Canyon Fire (Wikipedia) · Black Forest Fire (Wikipedia) · Gazette
In 2010, Colorado Springs voters approved a charter change shifting from a council-manager form of government to a strong-mayor system. The new structure gave the mayor direct authority over city operations, including budget proposals, department head appointments, and veto power over council ordinances. The first strong mayor was Steve Bach (2011–2015), followed by John Suthers (2015–2023), whose two terms brought relative stability and a construction boom.
Through the 2010s and 2020s, Colorado Springs experienced explosive population growth. The city added roughly 100,000 residents between 2010 and 2025, growing from 416,000 to approximately 490,000 — making it the second-largest city in Colorado and one of the fastest-growing metros in the Mountain West. Growth was driven by military expansion, tech-sector migration, remote workers fleeing coastal costs, and the city’s proximity to outdoor recreation.
But growth outpaced infrastructure. The city identified a 27,000-unit housing shortage, roads fell behind demand (deferred maintenance exceeding $400 million), and water supply planning became a critical long-term challenge. TABOR continued to constrain the city’s ability to raise revenue to match its growth, creating a structural tension between expansion and the resources needed to support it.
Colorado Springs (Wikipedia) · City of Colorado Springs · Gazette
In 2023, Colorado Springs elected Yemi Mobolade — a Nigerian-born business leader who ran as an independent — as its first Black mayor. Mobolade defeated Republican Wayne Williams with 51% of the vote, building an unusual coalition that crossed party lines in a city that has historically leaned conservative. His election signaled a shift in the city’s political identity: Colorado Springs was no longer a monolithically conservative city, even if its center of gravity remained right of center.
Mobolade’s first term has been defined by fiscal discipline under pressure. The FY2026 budget faced $31 million less than projected, driven by slower sales tax growth and rising public safety costs. He has prioritized emergency response times (improved from 15 minutes to 11), launched a homelessness outreach program, and fought to keep U.S. Space Command headquarters at Peterson Space Force Base against the Trump administration’s proposed relocation to Huntsville, Alabama.
Colorado Springs faces an identity question it has never had to answer before. For most of its history, the city’s identity was given to it by outsiders and institutions: Palmer’s resort vision, the military’s Cold War buildup, Focus on the Family’s evangelical infrastructure. Each era stamped the city with a clear label — resort town, military city, evangelical stronghold.
Today, none of those labels fully fits. The military remains the dominant economic force, but the tech sector is growing. Focus on the Family still occupies its campus, but the city’s demographics have diversified significantly — it is younger, more ethnically diverse, and less uniformly conservative than it was 20 years ago. An independent mayor, born in Lagos, runs the city. The Space Command fight is as much about economic identity as national defense: losing it would mean losing billions in annual economic impact and thousands of high-paying jobs.
The structural challenges are real: a 27,000-unit housing shortage, TABOR constraints that limit revenue growth, a deferred road maintenance backlog exceeding $400 million, and long-term water supply questions in an arid climate facing drought. But the city’s growth rate suggests that people are betting on its future — the question is whether the infrastructure, governance, and civic identity can keep pace with the population.
Last updated June 30, 2026 · Sources: Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, Wikipedia, Gazette, CPR News, KOAA, KRDO, City of Colorado Springs