Fossil Creek currents flow through region's change

Editor's note: To celebrate its first anniversary, the Fossil Creek Current looks at the history of the region the creek transects. One hundred thirty-three years ago, Fossil Creek also attracted pioneer publisher Joseph McClelland, who founded the county's first newspaper. Though he linked the creek's name to his orchard, no doubt he would have appreciated seeing the moniker attached to the tradition of his first love--a community newspaper.

By Dan MacArthur
Fossil Creek Current

Although it's a relatively short run from its birth in the foothills to its destination at the Poudre River, Fossil Creek cuts a wide swath in reflecting the region's history and its dramatic transition.

The creek gets its name from a ridge laden with fossilized remains of ancient shells left behind when the once-vast inland sea receded. Research by local historians shows that, during the western migration, the fossil-filled ridge in the late 1860s provided an improved path for stagecoaches avoiding the rougher road below. Still later, the ridge became a barrier containing Horsetooth Reservoir.

Fossil Creek starts as a trickle on the east side of that ridge directly across from the southern tip of the reservoir on the opposite side. As it proceeds toward the river, the creek becomes increasingly more defined until becoming a golf-ball-consuming chasm as it passes through the Southridge course.

But before this timid creek can become more bold, it is tamed by Fossil Creek Reservoir--an unexpected refuge for folks and wildlife just beyond the din of the traffic pounding by on Interstate 25 and Highway 392. From there, it's a short jaunt to the Poudre for the creek's remaining flow.

The territory Fossil Creek today traverses has largely produced its final crop of rooftops and turfgrass, but it once was a corridor of productive farms and orchards that supported a rural community then still far removed over rudimentary roads from Fort Collins miles away.

According to information provided by the Fort Collins Public Library's local history archives, the Fossil Creek Presbyterian Church was the center of that community. It extended from the Fossil Creek School at the southwest intersection of Harmony and College Avenue to the Harmony settlement at the intersection of Harmony and Timberline roads.

Neither the church nor the school still stands. Built in 1894-'95 of sandstone, largely by members of the congregation who worked in the Stout quarries now submerged under Horsetooth Reservoir, the church was razed after services were discontinued in 1919. Property a few hundred feet from the original church site was purchased in 1981 as the home of the current Harmony Presbyterian Church.

The school, located at the southwest corner of Harmony and College Avenue, was built in 1884 and demolished in 1986 to make way for Wal-Mart. It was built on donated land originally homesteaded by prominent pioneer Joseph McClelland.

An Illinois newspaper publisher, he took Horace Greeley's advice and headed west to escape abuse for his outspoken support of Greeley, who lost by a landslide in his quixotic effort to unseat Ulysses Grant in the 1872 presidential election. McClelland arrived in Fort Collins the following year and started the county's first newspaper. He continued to run it for several years, even after undertaking another enterprise that would become one of the state's oldest and largest orchard operations.

McClelland started planting apple trees on his original 160-acre homestead claim, eventually doubling his holdings after obtaining an adjoining 160-acre "tree claim," according to an account by one of his descendants. McClelland's name was given to a railroad siding constructed adjacent to his homestead. It was used both by passengers and for shipping fruit produced by what at first was known as the Fossil Creek Fruit Ranch. The original portion of the orchard was located along South College Avenue and the main part to the west on land now occupied by Applewood Estates.

The orchard operation passed down through subsequent generations of the family until a nascent nursery operation eventually grew to supplant the focus on fruit. The passing of that era foreshadowed the Fossil Creek corridor's continuing conversion in concert with the community.