First Denver Chamber of Commerce Building

Adams County, CO

The Rocky Mountain Arsenal was built on the plains northeast of Denver in 1942 to manufacture chemical weapons and incendiary munitions for the American war effort in World War II, and later served Cold War production needs. When its military mission ended, the same ground became one of the nation's most ambitious environmental cleanups, its contaminated acres eventually transformed into a national wildlife refuge. This marker honors the generations of workers who carried the site through all three chapters — production, demilitarization, and restoration — from 1942 to 2012.

Boulder County, CO

During the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps put hundreds of thousands of young men to work in the nation's forests and mountains. This plaque records Company 809, one of the CCC units that camped in the Colorado high country in 1933–34, building trails, roads, and erosion controls under supervisors like James F. Solan. The men earned a dollar a day, most of it sent home to struggling families.

Clear Creek County, CO

In the first two decades of the 20th century, this high, now-empty site above Clear Creek County was the town of Waldorf, a mining community perched near the Continental Divide. Like many Colorado boomtowns, it thrived briefly on ore and rail before fading into ruins. Today an interpretive site tells the story of what once stood here.

Colorado Springs, CO

This park honors Fred Polling McKown, born in 1882 in Ripley, West Virginia, who trained at the Colorado College School of Forestry and became Colorado Springs' first City Forester on January 1, 1911. He took up his post during the Progressive Era, when a national conservation movement was pushing American cities to plant, manage, and protect their urban trees and green spaces.