Denver metro · County guide

Douglas County

The county between Denver and Colorado Springs that taxed itself for 64,571 preserved acres and is engineering its way off a finite aquifer.

Where it is

Douglas County fills the 843 square miles between metro Denver and Colorado Springs, hung on the I-25 corridor with the Great Plains on its eastern half and Pike National Forest and the Rampart Range on its western edge. It straddles the Palmer Divide, the ridge that separates tributaries of the South Platte from tributaries of the Arkansas, so its creeks, Plum Creek and Cherry Creek, run north toward Denver. The South Platte forms the northwestern boundary and empties into Chatfield Reservoir at the county's low corner.

Arapahoe County to the north, Elbert County to the east, El Paso and Teller counties to the south, and Jefferson County to the west.

From downtown Denver

Highlands Ranch is 12 miles south of Denver and Lone Tree 20 miles, roughly 20 to 30 minutes on I-25 outside rush hour; Castle Rock runs closer to 40 minutes

Elevation

The Palmer Divide crosses the county between 6,000 and 7,500 feet, downtown Castle Rock sits at about 6,220 feet at the base of the butte, and Devils Head tops the Rampart Range at 9,748 feet

What makes it different

Six things that are true here and not one county over.

How it got here

1. 1861

   The Colorado territorial legislature created Douglas County as one of the original seventeen, naming it for Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. It first ran east to the Kansas border and shrank to its present size after statehood, when Elbert, Lincoln and Kit Carson counties were carved out. Franktown, a ranching settlement on the Jimmy Camp Trail, was the first county seat.

2. 1874

   Homesteader Jeremiah Gould donated 120 acres to be known as Castle Rock. Six streets were laid out, Elbert, Jerry, Wilcox, Perry, Castle and Front, a courthouse square was designated, and 77 lots of 50 by 112 feet were auctioned for $3,400 in total. The county seat moved there the same year, and the Denver and Rio Grande depot followed in 1875.

3. 1890

   The county courthouse was completed in Castle Rock using stone from the local rhyolite quarries. In the same year Denver interests commissioned Castlewood Dam on Cherry Creek above Franktown, meant to turn a flood-prone creek into irrigation supply. The courthouse burned in a 1978 arson. The dam had a shorter life than anyone planned.

4. 1906

   DuPont bought the site of present-day Louviers and began building both a dynamite plant and the village to house its workers, who lived in tents until the first houses were finished in 1908. A clubhouse followed in 1917 with an assembly hall, grocery, post office and a two-lane maple bowling alley. Pike National Forest, covering the county's western third, was also established in 1906.

5. 1912

   The Forest Service put the Devils Head lookout into service on the high point of the Rampart Range at 9,748 feet. It has been staffed continuously since and is the last full-time fire lookout in Colorado. Helen Dowe worked three seasons there from 1919 to 1921 as the first female fire lookout in America. The site was listed on the National Register in 2003.

6. 1933

   Castlewood Dam failed on August 3 after days of rain, sending a wall of water down Cherry Creek past Franktown and Parker and into Denver, which stayed flooded for days. Two people were killed. The ruins are still standing in what is now Castlewood Canyon State Park, 2,628 acres that entered the state park system in 1964 after acquisitions began in 1961.

7. 1965

   The largest flood in county history began in June after a tornado at Palmer Lake and days of rain saturated the ground. Water surged down East Plum Creek into Castle Rock, washed out Interstate 25 and every bridge between Castle Rock and Denver, and destroyed buildings in Louviers. The Army Corps of Engineers answered with Chatfield Dam, built between 1967 and 1975 at the county's northwest corner.

8. 1981

   The modern Highlands Ranch was founded, three years after Mission Viejo Company bought the ranch from the Phipps estate's buyer in 1978. Shea Homes took over in 1997. In 2010 Shea handed the Mansion, renovation money and an endowment to the Highlands Ranch Metro District, which spent $6 million over an 18-month restoration and reopened the house to the public on June 15, 2012.

9. 1994

   Voters approved the open space sales and use tax that has since preserved more than 64,000 acres. The same decade brought the Cherokee Ranch conservation easement in 1996, worked out between Tweet Kimball, the county and the Douglas County Open Lands Coalition, and the start of the I-25 wildlife crossing partnership. Voters extended the tax in 2022 by a margin above 87 percent.

The towns inside it

What the housing looks like

Castle Rock's original plat is six streets and 77 lots around a courthouse square, laid out in 1874, and the surviving nineteenth century buildings there are faced in pink, tan and gray rhyolite from quarries at the foot of the butte: the 1875 depot, the 1887 Hammar house, the 1897 Cantril School, the 1901 Keystone Hotel, the 1904 bank. Almost everything else in the county is post-1980 subdivision. Highlands Ranch was platted as one 22,000-acre master plan beginning in 1981, which reads on the ground as continuous curvilinear collectors, uniform fencing and landscaping along the arterials, and 2,644 acres of drainage-corridor open space threaded between neighborhoods, with more than 4,700 houses backing directly onto it. Parker built outward from a short Mainstreet of storefronts. Lone Tree started in 1982 with nine houses and now includes RidgeGate east of I-25, where the street grid, the light rail stations and the parks were platted ahead of the houses. A metropolitan district is visible in what it builds: brick perimeter walls, median plantings, trail underpasses and neighborhood parks are district infrastructure, carried by a separate mill levy on the property and maintained under recorded covenants rather than by the county. West and south of Sedalia the pattern breaks into large-lot parcels, pasture, barns and loafing sheds on gravel county roads. Louviers is the outlier: small, uniform frame houses on a fixed 1906 company-town plan around a 1917 Craftsman clubhouse.

The events board

Community events that come back every year. Each card links to the organiser for this year's exact date.