Yuma

Yuma, Colorado is a small agricultural city and former county seat on the High Plains of northeastern Colorado, developed as a railroad town and still serving as a local farm and trade center today.

History

Yuma began in the early 1880s as a siding and water stop on the Burlington railroad line across the eastern Colorado plains. A cluster of shacks, a small depot, water tower, livery barn, stores, and a saloon rapidly formed south of the tracks, and the town of Yuma was incorporated in 1887. The siding was named for a Native American railroad worker known simply as “Yuma,” who fell ill and died while working on the steep grade a few miles east of town; he was buried nearby, and the siding and later town took his name. When the townsite was platted, the established railroad name “Yuma” was retained for the new community, later also giving its name to Yuma County.

Population

Yuma grew as a regional farm and rail center, with population climbing through the first half of the twentieth century and peaking at just over 3,000 residents in late century counts. Recent figures place the population at about 3,300 residents, making it a modest but stable small city and one of the principal communities in Yuma County alongside Wray.

Major Industries

From the outset, Yuma’s economy has centered on agriculture, with wheat, corn, and cattle dominating the surrounding plains and the railroad providing critical market access. Over time, agribusiness, grain handling, equipment, and service firms joined with retail, education, health care, and light industry, giving Yuma a diversified small town economy still anchored in farm and ranch production.

Geography Coordinates

Yuma is located in eastern Yuma County, roughly 40 miles from both the Nebraska and Kansas borders, on the High Plains at an elevation of about 4,100–4,200 feet. Its approximate coordinates are 40.122° north latitude and 102.723° west longitude, placing the city in gently rolling shortgrass prairie country characteristic of northeastern Colorado.The city lies along U.S. Highway 34 and Colorado Highway 59, making it a junction point for regional farm traffic and travel between larger Front Range and Plains destinations. The surrounding landscape is a grid of section line roads, rectangular crop fields, and shelterbelt windbreaks, reflecting long established dryland and irrigated agriculture on the plains.

Obscure and distinctive facts

Local businessman Raimon von Horrum Schramm, a wealthy German immigrant, invested heavily in Yuma in the 1880s, building a brick yard where the city park now stands and erecting substantial brick commercial blocks that helped rebuild downtown after a devastating 1887 fire. The Yuma Pioneer newspaper, first issued on Christmas Day 1886—months before formal incorporation—became a key chronicler of town life, and later episodes such as a damaging 1916 cyclone and major lumberyard and hotel fires in the 1930s and 1980s shaped both the built environment and local memory