The lost places of Jefferson County

In 1890, the federal government established the United States Board of Geographic Names (USBGN) within the Department of the Interior. During a time of exploration and settlement, it was important to have standardization and consistency for the toponyms on the map.

Still today, the USBGN manages all of our country’s official place names – and retires names no longer in use. On an old map from the 1800’s, for instance, one might see the Boulder River that runs through our county seat labelled “Fields Creek.” That’s a historic variant of a feature still on our landscape today. 

Some other places, however, have been erased from the countryside over time. All that may be left today are the vestiges of old foundations and dead lodgepoles. “If a feature no longer exists and/or no longer serves the function by which it was named,” says the USBGN website, “the feature and name are marked as ‘historical’ in the Geographic Names Information System.”