A historic rainstorm in May 1876 caused Colorado’s worst flood in years

The storm hit the central mountain mining districts of the Colorado Territory early in the evening on Sunday, May 21, 1876, and it just kept coming.

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• May 21–27 

This story is part of Colorado at 150.

“At first it seemed a weak attempt at a spring shower, but by midnight it had turned into a terrific snow fall, accompanied by some wind,” reported the Rocky Mountain News. By Monday afternoon, when the telegraph lines to Georgetown and Central City cut out, over a foot of snow had fallen and more was still coming down.

In Denver, snow and hail gave way to rain, “which from ordinary drops increased to perfect sheets of water,” the News recounted. The storm raged all Sunday night and into Monday afternoon, then eased up into a “steady drizzle, with an occasional brilliant spurt, into the evening.”

“Indeed, (it) is still monotonously pattering at the hour of going to press — 4 o’clock a.m.,” the paper reported Tuesday, May 23. “In its dogged persistency it eclipses anything in the raining line that has ever happened here. The ’59ers all back us in this assertion.”

Six and a half inches of rain fell in Denver on May 22, 1876 — a record that still stands 150 years later.

“The weather maps show that a deep low (pressure system) developed over the south-eastern part of Colorado and the northeastern part of New Mexico, and a high just north of the Great Lakes,” the U.S. Geological Survey would write of the event in 1948. “Probably associated with this low was a mass of moist air from the Gulf which was forced upward by the Front Range, causing heavy precipitation.”

The downpour produced the worst flooding the region had experienced since 1864, the year of the “Great Flood” that killed at least eight people and destroyed dozens of buildings, including the offices of the Rocky Mountain News, which had been built just above Cherry Creek, and Denver’s first city hall.

Though the damage would be extensive, no deaths were reported in the News as a result of the 1876 flood, and hundreds of spectators crowded the banks of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River and “enjoyed the novel and exciting spectacle.”

“There was fascination in the terrible tumult of the seething torrent,” reported the paper. “The surface of the creek was flecked with logs, fences, bridge timbers, out houses, and ‘other evidences of civilization.’”

On the western bank of the Platte, “hacks and express wagons were employed hauling beds, babies, bundles of clothes, and the heads of families” out of inundated dwellings, and companies of firemen assisted in evacuating a dozen families from houses in low-lying bottomlands along the two flooded streams.

Other casualties of the flood included a portion of the Denver Marble Works on Larimer Street, which slid into Cherry Creek, along with a house owned by carpenter John Force. A foot bridge over Lawrence Street was entirely swept away, as was the Broadway bridge further south, which had been rebuilt only months earlier at a cost of $400 to the city.

Damaged railroad bridges all over the Front Range and the Eastern Plains delayed rail traffic for days, and the Colorado Central Railroad, a vital link to the mountain mining towns, was forced to temporarily ferry passengers between Denver and Golden in a four-horse carriage.

Though the Rocky Mountain News acknowledged the floods had been worse 12 years earlier, it needled the “old-timers” who pronounced themselves unimpressed by the latest deluge.

“If there should come a freshet one of these days that would leave a high water mark on the upper joint of the Lawrence Street tower,” the paper wrote, “some fellow would stand on top of a house on Capitol Hill and swear that it wasn’t ‘half as big a flood as that one in 1864.’”