In the late 20th century, the land that became Founders Village had earlier been homesteaded in its southern portion by neighboring settlers Frank X. Flierl and Frank Hagg, part of a Bavarian German immigrant community that settled the Ridge Road-Lower Lake Gulch Road area in the 1880s. Flierl, his wife Anna Ehmann, and their five children proved up 160 Homestead Act acres by 1899 in addition to 120 acres purchased in 1892, raising dairy cattle and farming the thin topsoil over rocky ground. Flierl also helped stone mason John Ehmann build Douglas County's first Catholic church, St. Francis of Assisi, dedicated in 1889, and worked for $1 a day building Castlewood Dam on Cherry Creek. His eldest son, John Frank Flierl, continued farming, ranching, and part-time masonry, including work on Charlford Castle, now Cherokee Castle and Ranch, outside Sedalia. Unlike the West Plum Creek section of Douglas County, which was settled by Protestant emigrants from the British Isles, the Cherry Valley-Upper Lake Gulch Road area was predominantly Catholic, with marriages, funerals, and church services conducted in both German and English, and even Methodist circuit preachers were bilingual. Long before settlement, a subtropical rainforest covered this land 5.5 million years ago, leaving petrified wood that still appears in the area today as evidence of 100-foot trees four feet in diameter. About 1945, John Frank Flierl, Hagg, and Guy Anderson sold their properties to Albert Mikelson, whose family continued farming until selling to Park Funding for development; after a default, the Mikelsons developed a small part themselves before the company regained ownership. Early Founders Village had only 85 houses and lacked public services, parks, schools, and even snow removal during the first winter of 1985, before Rock Ridge Elementary School and Founders Park opened in the late 1980s.