The thing I remember the most about Elbert County are the rolling hills formed by the small creeks and washes draining the forests and plains. The west end of the county has part of Colorado’s Black Forest, and is covered in a patchwork of trees on the rounded ridges and gentle meadows slopping down to the creek bottoms. To the east the elevation gradually decreases and the trees become more occasional, until the only ones to be seen near Limon are the willows and cottonwoods marking permanent sources of water.
The county was named for one of Colorado’s Territorial Governors, Samuel H. Elbert. (A lot of stuff got named after him.) There are four main towns in the county. Elizabeth is a fast growing bedroom community in the west end of the county. It currently holds the majority of political power in the county because of a gerrymandering plan that backfired upon the ranching residents of the east. It was named for the first Governor’s daughter, before that it was called Running Creek. Elbert is a sleepy little town south of Kiowa near the source of Kiowa Creek. Kiowa is also a small town, but being the county seat it is about twice the size of Elbert with about 275 souls. The Elbert County Museum is there, but rarely open. Simla is in the east and is about twice the size of Kiowa, but I do not know much about it because I’ve never visited there.
Interesting factoids: The county is 80 kilometers from east to west and generally ¬ shaped.
The elevation in the west is around 2300 meters (over 7500 feet) to 1500 meters (about 5,000 feet) in the east. I-70 crosses the north-east corner of the county and Limon is just across the board in Lincoln County, Colorado. Also for a while in the 1990's it was the second fastest growing county in the US, though that was not hard considering it had only about 10,000 residents at the time and near 20,000 today.
The Sand Creek Massacre in Kiowa County, Colorado was in response to the killing of the Hungate family near Boxelder Creek. In respons to the murders by the US army the Dietemann family was murdered in 1865 near Kiowa, Colorado.