News Flashbacks

Fort Collins As A Shipping Point

Merchandise in Great Amount and Variety Sent Out Daily

Fort Collins Express, January 19, 1889

Anyone in doubt as to the importance of Fort Collins as a shipping point should watch the freight train that leaves here for the east every afternoon. These trains carry 20 to 40 cars each, and contain a great variety of merchandise. In the first place there are large quantities of stone shipped daily in the shape of flagging, curbing, paving blocks, dimension stuff, rubble, and immense blocks of red stone destined perhaps for Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, New York or Boston.

Then there is lumber, posts, poles, flour, feed, wheat, corn, barley, oats, potatoes, cabbage and other vegetables, hay, cattle, sheep, horses, hogs, hides, dressed meat, wool, and a great variety of other truck from our farms, gardens and ranches. Besides the merchandise sent out on these trains, there are large quantities sent south over The Colorado Central and by express on all the passenger trains leaving town. It will not be long before Fort Collins will ship out ore, minerals, marble, plaster, lime, canned goods, woolen cloths, and other products of our future mills, mines and manufactories.