unincorporated community
An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...
that used to have a
U.S. Post Office
The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or simply the Postal Service, is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal serv ...
Colorado
Colorado is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States. It is one of the Mountain states, sharing the Four Corners region with Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is also bordered by Wyoming to the north, Nebraska to the northeast, Kansas ...
, United States. The ZIP Code of Carr is 80612. Some consider Carr a
ghost town
A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...
. Today, a few old houses remain plus a church and the schoolhouse, but the old store fronts are gone. There are some scattered old foundations throughout the town. There are a growing number of year-round residents, so the town no longer appears abandoned.
History
The town of Carr was established by the
Union Pacific Railroad
The Union Pacific Railroad is a Railroad classes, Class I freight-hauling railroad that operates 8,300 locomotives over routes in 23 U.S. states west of Chicago and New Orleans. Union Pacific is the second largest railroad in the United Stat ...
in 1872. Carr was named for Robert E. Carr of the Union Pacific, who managed the construction of the rail line through the town. The Carr, Colorado, post office opened on March 26, 1872.
From 1920 until 1939, the town carried Old Colorado State Highway 5, which was meant as an access route. However, during this time, routes numbered 1–19 were major cross state highways, making it a somewhat useless route.
The U. S. Post Office was closed circa 2021 when the privately owned building, that was being leased by the USPS, became uninhabitable.
One of the local landmarks was a
Geodesic Dome
A geodesic dome is a hemispherical thin-shell structure (lattice-shell) based on a geodesic polyhedron. The rigid triangular elements of the dome distribute stress throughout the structure, making geodesic domes able to withstand very heavy ...
greenhouse just south of the post office on County Road 21 (a.k.a. 2nd Street.). The structure was torn down circa 2022 after the new Post Office building owners took possession.
Circa 2022, County Road 21 (a.k.a. 2nd Street) was paved from County Road 126 (a.k.a. Stevenson Avenue) to County Road 124. It is the first paved north–south road.
Geography
Carr is located at coordinates . Just north of the Carr turnoff on I-25 is the Carr Natural Fort. It is a natural limestone formation where many noted Indian battles took place between the Crow and Blackfeet tribes.
The town sits in the bottom of the Lone Tree Creek valley. When just passing through, the size of the valley may seem relatively insignificant, but it is large enough for a
temperature inversion
In meteorology, an inversion (or temperature inversion) is a phenomenon in which a layer of warmer air overlies cooler air. Normally, air temperature gradually decreases as altitude increases, but this relationship is reversed in an inver ...
to hold cold air in place in the wintertime.
See also
*
Greeley, CO Metropolitan Statistical Area
Weld County is a county located in the U.S. state of Colorado. As of the 2020 census, the population was 328,981. The county seat is Greeley. Weld County comprises the Greeley, CO Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is included in the Denve ...
List of post offices in Colorado
A list is a set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of the list-maker, but ...