On April 28, 1946, Goldenites both young and old gathered to dedicate a monument honoring “the almost forgotten, but once prosperous placer camp of Arapahoe City,” according to Colorado Transcript archives.
Students from the nearby Fairmount School collected rocks from the stream for the monument along West 44th Avenue near McIntyre Street. Local civic groups erected it with a plaque explaining how the immediate area was once home to Jefferson County’s first gold-rush community.
Now, exactly 78 years later, the community-erected monument stands behind a fence on private property. Anyone interested in reading the plaque should either bring binoculars or a camera, as the text is hardly visible from the public right-of-way.
While the state owns the monument itself, it stands on property owned by the Coors Brewing Company.
The area was formerly accessible to the public. However, Coors erected a fence around the property because of recent incidents of people illegally camping on the property and potentially contaminating the nearby canal and lake, officials explained.
John Stonebraker, vice president of Molson Coors Beverage Company’s Golden Valley Operations, said in an email statement that the brewery erected the fence in conjunction with the Farmer’s Reservoir & Irrigation Company — a nearby stakeholder — and the Jeffco Planning & Zoning Department. He said the monument remains visible through the fence, and that Golden History Museum & Park had been offered access on an ongoing basis.
As of April 25, Coors hadn’t responded to the Transcript’s request to elaborate further on its plans for the land surrounding the monument or reinstating public access to it.
Nathan Richie, director of the Golden History Museum & Park, said he’s received numerous inquiries about the site, but the museum doesn’t offer public tours of the monument.
He said Stonebraker’s comment referred to the museum’s ongoing collaboration with the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes. On a recent visit, Richie said some officials were interested in seeing sites on Coors’ property in the same area.
So, the museum can request access in special cases like that, he said, adding: “But we aren’t running tours of the site to the public.”
Possible solutions
Richie said possible solutions for restoring public access would be working with Coors to move the fence or moving the monument itself. The former could work in the short-term, but the latter could solve two problems simultaneously.
As the name suggests, Arapahoe City “was built on top of an Arapaho village on well-known Arapaho land,” Richie said, adding that the museum’s tribal partners have a wealth of knowledge to share about the area.
If the monument is moved — ideally onto public property in the same area — Richie said it’d be a perfect opportunity to update the plaque to include more of the area’s pre-1858 history.
In fact, History Colorado — the state’s historical society, which officially owns the monument — is planning to inventory its 230 markers statewide ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary and Colorado’s 150th anniversary in 2026.
Once inventoried, History Colorado will prioritize markers that need to be moved and/or updated, and work on adding new markers to some historic areas, Preservation Planner Lindsey Flewelling said. The initiative is currently in fundraising stage, but she believed it would start work on Colorado’s historic markers before 2026 and establish an ongoing maintenance plan after that.
Flewelling anticipated the Arapahoe City monument would be listed as a historic marker that needs to be moved and updated as part of this larger initiative.
She said the monument is in a relatively unique predicament, being so far from public right-of-way that it’s inaccessible on private property. Flewelling said she more frequently hears about situations where a road was widened, leaving a historic marker too close to the right-of-way.
Like Richie, she hoped the America 250-Colorado 150 initiative would provide an opportunity to update the Arapahoe City plaque — and others like it — “to ensure the history being portrayed is inclusive of that fuller history,” she continued.
A-City: Past, present & future
As the monument plaque describes, Arapahoe City was officially organized on Nov. 29, 1858 along the Clear Creek valley east of present-day Golden. George A. Jackson and John H. Gregory stayed there for a time, before proceeding west to strike gold and make history.
In 1860, Arapahoe City’s population was 80.
Past editions of the Transcript describe it as little more than a tent city along the valley. According to Richie, it was one of Golden’s many sister communities like Apex, which were either incorporated into Golden or were essentially abandoned.
The monument was established in 1946, and the bronze plaque was stolen around 2015.
History Colorado replaced the plaque in 2018 for more than $1,200, Flewelling confirmed. The plaque that’s on the monument now is a replica of the one installed in 1946, with the exact same wording, as Transcript archives confirm.
The rock portion has never been replaced, Flewelling said. So, it should still be made of the same stones Fairmount students found almost four score years ago.
As for the land itself, Jefferson County archives state the 33-acre parcel at 15950 W. 44th Ave. was sold to the Adolph Coors Company in January 1976 for $2,200. The Adolph Coors Company then deeded the property to the Coors Brewing Company in December 1992.
Richie said there’s nothing “sacred” about the monument’s exact spot. It could easily be moved to another, more accessible spot in the same vicinity and still poignantly convey the area’s history.
He hoped the America 250-Colorado 150 initiative would provide that opportunity.
“Nothing’s set in stone,” he said of possible solutions to restoring public access. “ … But, if we were to envision it over again, how would we commemorate that site?”