Before becoming a college, Fort Lewis was a U.S. military post located in Hesperus, Colorado. The post was decommissioned in 1891. The U.S. government then refitted the vacant facility into a non-reservation boarding school, which operated from 1892 to 1910. Navajo, Ute, and Apache children were the first of many Indigenous children to attend the school. In 1911, the Federal government ceded the facility and 6,000 acres of land to the State of Colorado. Fort Lewis became a high school, then a two-year state agricultural college. In 1956, the school moved to Durango, where it transformed yet again into a four-year liberal arts college.
