GIll

Gill is an unincorporated community and a U.S. Post Office in Weld County, Colorado, United States.

History

Gill was originally a station on the Crow Creek Valley branch of the Union Pacific Railroad, named after William Gill, who filed a plat for the town on his land in 1909. By the end of 1910, Gill had a sugar beet dump, a post office and a two-story general merchandise store which also housed a bank and a number of rooms used for community gatherings. A grain elevator built in Gill in 1911, burned to the ground twice, and was twice rebuilt. By 1915, Gill had a number of businesses, including a blacksmith with a vehicle repair shop, a meat market, a grocery and a branch of Gilcrest Lumber. The railroad tracks were removed around 1965. Gill is named after William H. Gill, an early landowner. It has had a post office in operation since 1910, serving as a rural settlement mostly tied to agriculture and ranching in the region. The town was plotted along the Union Pacific rail line around 1909 by William H. Gill, reflecting a common pattern of early 20th-century Western railroad town development. However, Gill has not grown significantly over the years and today is a modest community with much of its early infrastructure diminished or repurposed. Its prime period appears to have been in the early to mid-1900s when it served as a local hub for ranching and small commerce but it has since declined in prominence, with many buildings now in a state of disrepair and the population relatively smal

Geography

Gill is located in northeastern Colorado with coordinates approximately 40.41°N latitude and 104.61°W longitude, at an elevation around 4,700 feet. Because it is an unincorporated or very small community, formal measurements of land and water area are not well defined or officially recorded. The area is typical of eastern Colorado’s plains with a semi-arid climate and land primarily used for ranching and agriculture. Population data for Gill are sparse, but the community today likely numbers in the low hundreds or fewer

Comments

Gill presented a challenge of which four old buildings to include in the website.