Russellville rose five miles southeast of here in late 1858 after William Green Russell found a few specks of gold at Russellville Gulch, drawing an advance wave of Pikes Peak prospectors, but its placer diggings proved too poor to sustain fortunes and the town declined after the main rush shifted to the Central Rockies in 1859, eventually becoming a ghost town by 1880 after a brief life as a way station. In the early 1860s, both Russellville and Franktown maintained small stockades against Confederate raiders seeking Colorado's gold fields, with local residents supporting federal volunteer patrols along the Jimmy Camp Trail; volunteer cavalry camped near Russellville in 1863 while hunting Southern guerrillas, six Texans of the Reynolds gang were executed there the next year, and Colorado troops also helped repel Confederate forces at Glorieta Pass in March 1862. Franktown began when James Frank Gardner built a squatter's cabin in 1859, became a rest stop on the Jimmy Camp Trail, served as Douglas County's seat in 1861, moved to its present site in 1863, and remained a small ranching and farming community even after railroads bypassed the trail and county offices moved to Castle Rock in 1874. Its agricultural life was strengthened by the grange movement, beginning with the Fonder Grange in 1875 and continuing with Pikes Peak Grange No. 163 in 1908, whose social and cooperative work helped bind the rural community together. South of Franktown, the Pinery supplied much of the lumber used in early Colorado during the 1860s and early 1870s, feeding sawmills around Franktown and later providing railroad ties before larger transportation routes undercut the local timber trade, which had largely ended by 1880. Castlewood Dam, built on Cherry Creek in 1890 about five miles south of here, leaked almost from the start, partially crumbled in 1897, and finally collapsed on August 3, 1933, unleashing a flood toward Denver that devastated nearby farms, destroyed six bridges downstream, and killed two people.