Bordering the Colorado Air and Space Port lies an abandoned farmstead that drew my attention following a night spent camping at a nearby ranch.
Bordering the Colorado Air and Space Port lies an abandoned farmstead that drew my attention following a night spent camping at a nearby ranch. The structure is a modest, cross-gabled ranch house, likely built in the mid-to-late twentieth century. It rests on concrete block piers and features wood-frame construction. The original siding has been removed, revealing the horizontal wooden rails beneath. The low-pitched roof remains clad in asphalt shingles, typical of a more modern era and region.
This land was previously owned by Herbert Hiram Champlin III, a petroleum executive whose Champlin Petroleum Company was once the largest privately owned, fully integrated oil company in the United States.
The Colorado Air and Space Port, once known as Front Range Airport, is a small public facility that opened in 1984. At that time, Denver’s primary airport was Stapleton International, which has since been decommissioned and demolished. In October 2011, then-Governor John Hickenlooper petitioned the federal government to designate Colorado as a “spaceport state.” The goal was to certify the airport for suborbital horizontal takeoff and landing—enabling commercial space tourism, rapid intercontinental travel, and cargo transport.
The Federal Aviation Administration approved the request in 2018, officially establishing the Colorado Air and Space Port as a spaceport.
By late 2022, development began on TransPort Colorado, a 6,000-acre industrial mixed-use project adjacent to the airport. The abandoned house, part of this acreage, was acquired during the expansion. It now falls within “Sub-Area 6,” a designation that precludes future agricultural use. The land has been subdivided and is slated for redevelopment into an industrial lot, sealing the fate of the house and erasing the last traces of its rural past.
Such structures, once ordinary and unremarkable, now serve as quiet witnesses to a rapidly vanishing landscape.
Be First to Comment