Westminster, Colorado

Colorado

A university here closed in 1917 because every single student left to fight in World War One.

In 1890 a New Yorker named Henry Mayham talked the Denver Presbytery into building a university on land he owned. A depression slowed things down, but the school went up in red sandstone quarried from the Red Rocks region. The curriculum copied Princeton, and people started calling it the Princeton of the West. Classes began in 1908. A year's tuition cost fifty dollars. Then in 1917 the school stopped operating, because all the students in attendance left to fight in World War One. The building later served as a church and a school, and it now sits on the National Register of Historic Places. The name Westminster came with the university, replacing an older name. Before that the place was Harris, and before Harris it was DeSpain Junction, after a Kentucky farmer who built a house on a hundred and sixty acres in 1870. City Hall carries a fourteen story bell tower meant as a nod to Big Ben. Westminster, England, sent over an English oak, and it still grows on the property.

Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.

What this was written from
The school ceased operating in 1917, when all students in attendance left to fight in World War I.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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