The area now known as Englewood has it roots in the very origins of the whole state of Colorado. In 1858 a group of miner from Georgia came to explore the South Plate River valley. They did find some gold in what is now downtown Denver, but not enough to hold their interest. So only a few stayed on searching the small creeks that fed into the river. Eventually they found a much bigger deposit at Little Dry Creek where it meets the river, today just west from the intersection of Dartmouth Avenue and Santa Fe Drive. This discovery set off the Colorado gold rush of AD 1859 and is commemorated with a plaque in C.E. Cushing Park.
The placer gold on the planes soon played out and the miners moved up into the mountains, but interest in the area had been sparked. People more interested in farming soon joined the settlers and in AD 1860 an Irish immigrant named Thomas Skerritt filed a claim on a 640-acre homestead on what is today the north end of Englewood. By AD 1864 he had built the first cabin in the area, calling it "Shadyside", it still stands today at 3560 South Bannock Street.
That year he also set out to extend a street from Denver by dragging a route with his wagon and a log south from near his house north to Cherry Creek. It was known as Broadway from the very beginning, renowned for both its width (30 meters across) and how it is rather less than straight. This was part of his various land speculation deals Mr. Skerritt made to encourage the growth of his settlement.
The area was becoming generally settled long before the city incorporated in AD 1903. At that time it was know as Orchard Place due to the fruit trees planted by another settler, Jacob C. Jones. However the town had a bit of an unsavory reputation as the place where residents of Denver went for gambling, wilder saloons, and roadhouses from about AD 1880 to AD 1900. As part of a campaign to change the town's reputation they formally incorporated and changed their name to Englewood after a city near Chicago. The name choice may also have been due to Mr. Skerritt loosing the first election by a narrow margin to Mr. Jones, who ran on a platform of reform.
It settled down to sort of a quiet prosperity as a suburb on the edge of Denver for the next sixty some years. But an accident of bureaucracy made the town somewhat famous. When the Denver Tech Center was started in the late 1960's it had no post office of its own. So the nearest large postal center was used as the address, and that meant the name Englewood was attached to the mail of many large corporations through AD 2000 when the south end of the Tech Center was finally incorporated in the city of Centennial.
It has little industry today, though once the now rusting industrial areas along the Platte River provided much employment for the residents living in the proper homes of the city. Despite being a suburb it has been hit by many of the problem faced by larger cities due to its age and large developments that eventually failed. For example Cinderella City, once a prosperous mall quickly fell on hard times after it was built in the 1970s. It is undergoing a bit of a recovery, but it is unlikely to get back to full prosperity anytime soon.