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Narrative Overview <br />The Louisville Historic Building and National Register <br />Survey involved inventory and evaluation of seventy historic <br />buildings in the city of Louisville, Boulder County, Colorado. <br />The city is located in the eastern part of the County in an <br />eco-zone that represents a transition from high plains piedmont <br />to the front range of the Rocky Mountains. The survey area <br />is located between six and six and one-half miles east of the <br />base of the mountains(See figure 1). The entire area is underlaid <br />with sub -bituminous coal deposits usable for home and commercial <br />building heating. The deposits are overlaid with bentonite, <br />clay and sandy loam soils suitable for farming, either dryland <br />or with irrigation. Precipitation, primarily winter snows and <br />summer thunderstorms, is not enough to support agriculture typical <br />of lands in the Mississippi Valley.1 Nevertheless, those two <br />natural resources -the soil and coal below it- were the primary <br />determiners of the city's history until the years after World <br />War II. <br />The area of east Boulder County that became Louisville <br />was first settled during the mid and late 1860s, at a time when <br />coal deposits were being discovered a few miles southwest of <br />the present city. By the early 1870s the Marshall coal field <br />was being developed by Denver entrepreneurs and the Denver and <br />Boulder Valley Railway was built to haul out the coal.2 The <br />first Anglo-American occupants of the Louisville area, the David <br />1 <br />