Old Stone Fort

The plaque's 610 feet are now measured from the wrong spot: the boulder was carried across Davidson Street when the shopping center went in. South of it, on private land among old willows, stand the remains of what David McShane built beside his stone house in the mid-1860s, a round room twelve feet across with walls two feet thick, a log roof and portholes closed by sliding stone blocks. Local accounts add a passage from the house and a lookout hill, and a descendant recalled forty people crowded inside at once.

What the plaque says

This tablet is the property of the State of Colorado Due south 610 feet is the Old Stone Fort built at the pioneer home of David McShane. Constructed as a defense against Arapaho and Cheyenne raiders, it was a refuge used in 1865-1868 by the following pioneer families of the upper Monument valley; Guire Brown · Jackson · Shideler Chandler · McShane · Teachout Davidson · Oldham · Walker DeMasters · Roberts · Watkins Faulkner · Simpson · Welty Erected by the State Historical Society of Colorado from the Mrs. J. N. Hall Foundation and by the Zebulon Pike and Kinnikinnik Chapters, D. A. R., and by citizens of the Monument region 1950

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Garden of the Gods — 15 mi
  Named in 1859 by a surveyor who wanted no beer garden there, and given to the city in 1909 on the condition it stay free, dry and unbuilt.
• Manitou Cliff Dwellings — 16 mi
  A pueblo from McElmo Canyon, dismantled, shipped across the Rockies by rail and set in cement into a dynamited overhang as cliff dwellings it never was.
• Pikes Peak Cog Railway — 17 mi
  A mattress maker's answer to a two-day mule ride, running since 1891, shut in 2017 and rebuilt from the rails up with Swiss trains in 2021.
• Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument — 25 mi
  Redwood stumps buried by a volcanic mudflow 34 million years ago, sold off by the piece for a century, and saved in 1969 by scientists ready to lie down in front of bulldozers.

More markers nearby

• Ute Pass — 16 mi
• Old Fort and Stockade — 17 mi
• Log House — 17 mi
• Colorado City — 17 mi