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Montrose County Courthouse
The town of Montrose was founded in 1882, a short time after the Ute
Indians were removed from the Uncompahgre (Un come pah gray) Valley. The
town was named after a Sir  Walter
Scott Novel. Early Montrose was a typical frontier freighting and cow town.
Gun play, quarreling and saloon brawls were common and made history
and legend. At the turn of the century, the settlers of the highly
fertile, semi-arid valley explored the formerly inaccessible regions of the
Black Canyon of the Gunnison River. The result of this search for irrigation
water was one of the first of the Bureau of Reclamation projects and an
astounding engineering feat; The 7 mile long Gunnison Tunnel, which turned
the valley into an "Agricultural Mecca". President Howard Taft
came to Montrose to dedicate the project in September of 1909.
The Courthouse above dates back to the early part of the century and is
still used as it was originally intended.
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