Colorado's Earliest Settlements

Before a plaza was a town it was a fort. The first settlers here lived in jacales of upright cottonwood posts, then built flat-roofed adobe houses joined around a square, families divided by solid walls, with gates at the openings; the patio inside served as the corral. When raids by the Utes, the Nuuchiu whose valley this was, ended, the gates came off and windows were cut in the outer walls. The valley's wheat found its first market in 1859, when a San Luis mill began sending flour north to the Denver diggings.

What the plaque says

Colorado's Earliest Settlements Hispano pioneers founded Colorado's first permanent settlements. Settlers began pushing northward from Taos toward present Colorado in the early 1800s, and in 1844 the Mexican government gave the Sangre de Cristo land grant to two Taos residents. The Costilla area of the grant was permanently colonized in 1849. Farther north on the grant San Luis was founded in 1851, other settlements soon occurring nearby. Because of hostile Utes and Apaches houses were built in defensive plazas with windowless exterior walls. Fort Massachusetts (1852) and its successor Fort Garland (1858) were established by the U.S. Army to protect these villages, many of which developed into towns that survive today. When gold was discovered in Colorado in 1858, the well-established farms of the San Luis Valley provided produce for the new supply-starved camps. Today the valley is an important agricultural area of the state. Erected by the State Historical Society of Colorado and the Colorado Department of Highways through the Robert S. Ellison Memorial Fund, 1972.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shrine of the Stations of the Cross — 0.6 mi
  A parish's own Calvary on the mesa above Colorado's oldest town, with bronze stations by a San Luis sculptor whose models went to the Vatican.

More markers nearby

• San Luis Valley — 0.7 mi
• San Luis Peoples Ditch — 1.0 mi
• Fort Garland — 15 mi