South Platte Valley Historical Society Society`````````````````````````````South Platte Valley Historical Society

Rebuilding the Past - For the Future

Last Update

May 14, 2013

The South Platte Valley Historical Society has a mission to preserve the history of the South Platte Valley area.  The Society is creating a one-hundred acre History Park on the north side of Fort Lupton with facilities dedicated to education, historic interpretation, and improvement of the local economy.

Coming Soon in 2013:  

               Independence School Sessions June 17-19, June 24-26 & July 15-17

              Trapper Days Rendezvous- September 5-8th

              Hunters Widow's Rendezvous-September 13-15th

              Colonial Encampment - October 4-6th.

              FLMLC 2013 Calendar

*If you find broken links, erroneous or missing information, or just poorly written sections let me know at Webmaster.  

Twenty-Four years in the making, new Fort Lupton is ready for visitors

The recreation of the old fort is an original-sized replica built by volunteers in Fort Lupton, Colorado

Lt. Lancaster Lupton and his crew planned and built the Colorado fur trading post called Fort Lancaster in less than two years.

Recreating his 1836 adobe fort took 24.

Rebuilding the fort was the motivation for the formation of the South Platte Valley Historical Society in 1988. Its members raised funds to purchase the original fort site, but were seven years too late to save the final wall from demolition by workers erecting gas and oil drilling rigs on the site. Only a wagonload of the original adobe bricks was salvaged, stored under a tarp in the public works shop in Fort Lupton, the city of 7,500 that bears the name of the original fort builder.

Restoration of two mid-1800’s buildings, a one room school and a farmhouse, diverted the group’s focus until Arnie Hubert, a retiree transplanted to

Fort Lupton, said he would lead the endeavor. Without money to complete the work, but aware that belief that the project would ever come to fruition

was fading, the SPVHS broke ground for the new fort, a few yards south of the original, on October 23, 2004.

Hubert and the SPVHS members decided the new fort was to have walls of stucco, not adobe, erected on building-code sanctioned foundations. Its

configuration, 40 X 60 paces (128 X 150 feet) would mirror the original, and it was to be a living history fort, as authentic possible, and built without

government funds.

Eight years, 25,000 volunteer hours and $220,000 later, the fort was finished in mid-2012. Supplier’s donations kept the cost to half of what the structure would have cost without their help, and as promised, the fort was privately funded.

Jessica Ridgeway Memorial Scholarship

Information and Application