Franktown

The bronze's third sponsor gets four words, Dr. Margaret Long, and she is the reason it stands. A Johns Hopkins-trained physician and a daughter of a Massachusetts governor, she came to Denver with tuberculosis in 1905, practiced there until 1930 and campaigned for suffrage. In retirement she drove the old trails, and in 1943 published The Smoky Hill Trail, a guide to finding them from modern highways. In the mid-1940s she helped pay for a run of state bronzes along the trail's Colorado end, this one and the Twenty Mile House plaque at Parker among them.

What the plaque says

This tablet is the property of the State of Colorado Franktown Named for J. Frank Gardner, a pioneer who settled here in 1859. First known as "California Ranch," it was a way station on the stage line between Denver and Santa Fe. In a stockade built here, neighbors found refuge from Indians in 1864. Franktown became the first county seat of Douglas County, in 1861. Erected by the State Historical Society of Colorado from the Mrs. J.N. Hall Foundation and by the American Pioneer Trails Association, Dr. Margaret Long, and children of Franktown. 1946

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Colorado State Capitol — 27 mi
  A capitol of Colorado granite, marble, onyx and gold, with three different steps claiming to stand exactly a mile high.
• Red Rocks Amphitheatre — 31 mi
  Walker's Garden of the Titans, finished by the CCC between Ship Rock and Creation Rock and dedicated on June 15, 1941.
• Dinosaur Ridge — 31 mi
  A hogback near Morrison with the bones of 1877 on one flank and the footprints a road crew blasted open in 1937 on the other.

More markers nearby

• Twenty Mile House — 9.0 mi
• Old Stone Fort — 21 mi
• Overland Park — 24 mi
• Sand Creek Massacre — 27 mi