Settlement of the area which would become Colo began in 1856 when the small village of New Albany was founded. By the early 1860s the railroad reached the area with the first train station in Story County being built in the community in 1863. Colo would be incorporated on April 26, 1876 and would take its name from the dog of railroad official John Blair. Reportedly Colo the dog succumbed to a grisly fate as it was crushed by a train that was carrying construction material. The community would see an influx of visitors in the 1920s and 1930s with the completion of
the Lincoln and Jefferson highways which intersect in Colo at the Reed/Niland Corner.
Other towns which had owed their existence to the coming of the railroads were Colo and Ontario, Colo had an immediate importance as a depot of railroad supplies for a time, and its establishment had had the effect of destroying utterly the near-by village of New Albany which never had been a considerable burg but which nevertheless had been known upon the map. Ontario was immediately adjacent to New Philadelphia, which village it geographically superseded. But Ontario never was able to succeed to the measure of general interest and importance which
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ing to the new country. But the statements are definite and, probably, to a large extent accurate. The extract relating to Story County is as follows : "Leaving State Center we immediately enter the county of Story and passing the small depot tow'n of Colo, reach Nevada the seat of justice of Story county, a pleasant prairie town of from ten to twelve hundred people. The county was organized in 1854. and the first house was built in Nevada the same year. The town was doomed to many years of languishment and to those untoward vicissitudes incident to an inland point without the means
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Scans and text from the Internet Archive. Books published in 1930 or earlier, which are in the public domain.
Timeline
Colo, 1864 to 1975
Woven from the archive, old maps, post office records, the National Register and the people born here.
Founding dates: Wikidata, Wikipedia, the U.S. post office records of Blevins & Helbock (CC0) and the Census. Homes by year built: Census ACS 2020–24. National Register of Historic Places: National Park Service (list of May 22, 2026). Old photos, postcards and papers: Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other public archives, credited on each item’s page. Maps: U.S. Geological Survey historical topographic maps (via Esri) and Sanborn fire-insurance maps (Library of Congress). History text and census tables: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Places that used to be: USGS Geographic Names Information System (2021). How TownRatings grades history →
From Wikimedia Commons (7), Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikipedia for famous people, U.S. Geological Survey historical maps, U.S. Census counts (via Wikipedia), the US Post Offices dataset (Blevins & Helbock), the USGS Geographic Names Information System and old county and town histories (Internet Archive). Archive images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.
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