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Inside Timnath

History

Timnath history: from Sherwood Station to the fastest-growing town in the county

An Overland Trail stage stop, a schoolhouse called Fairview, a railroad in 1882, a name from the Book of Judges, a church that is still the only one in town, and a farm town of 625 that grew tenfold in a decade. The short history of Timnath, with each claim resting on a source.

The Timnath Town Square pocket park in Old Town, a brick path between planters with the old school beyond

Timnath begins with a stagecoach stop. Sherwood Station, a stop on the Overland Trail, opened in 1860 on the Sherwood Ranch along the Cache la Poudre, and the first schoolhouse went up the same year about half a mile west of the present town, named Fairview. Settlers took up farms along the river through the 1860s, held church services in a log schoolhouse near the river from 1869, and by 1880 had outgrown Fairview and built a new school just north of where the town now stands. The turning point was 1882, when the Greeley, Salt Lake and Pacific Railroad laid its line through the valley and a settlement gathered around the siding.

The name and the church

The settlement got its name from its minister. The Rev. Charles A. Taylor became the Presbyterians’ permanent pastor in 1883, when the church was formally organized with 21 members, and when he established the post office in 1884 he named the place Timnath, after the town in the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Judges where Samson went to find a wife. The congregation built its church on Main Street in the summer of 1888 for $3,500, with a sanctuary and a lecture room; it is the first and only house of worship ever built in Timnath and one of the oldest Presbyterian churches in continuous existence in Colorado, and the original pews, pulpit and beams are still in use. The town incorporated on July 6, 1920.

The farm town

For most of the twentieth century Timnath was a farm town: potatoes, alfalfa, sugar beets and cattle on the irrigated land between the river and the reservoirs, a grain elevator on Main Street built in 1920 for Colorado Feed & Grain, a school, a church and a few hundred people. The census counted 223 residents in 2000 and 625 in 2010. The Depression hit the church hard enough that in 1933 it had no permanent minister and nine different preachers filled the pulpit for about two dollars a Sunday.

The boom

Then Harmony Road and I-25 caught up with it. The Town adopted a home-rule charter in 2006, opened Bethke Elementary in 2008, and annexed and approved the neighborhoods that now surround Old Town on every side: Timnath Ranch, WildWing, Timnath Lakes and the rest. Costco and Walmart arrived at Weitzel Street, the Town bought and opened Timnath Reservoir to residents, and the 2020 census counted 6,487 people, an increase of about 870 percent in ten years. Timnath Middle-High School opened in August 2022, WildWing Park in 2025, and the last gap in the 45-mile Poudre River Trail, a bridge south of town, closed in June 2026. The Town’s own estimate is about 11,600 residents in 2025. The grain elevator, meanwhile, holds a brewery and a public market, and the three blocks of Main Street are a Colorado Main Street community.

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