Ault, Colorado
Drive north out of Greeley on US 85 and the sugar-beet flats roll on until the road meets Highway 14 and a sign tells you you've reached Ault, Colorado — "A Unique Little Town." The slogan is an acronym, of course, one of those small-town jokes that stuck. About 1,900 people live here at 4,948 feet, close enough to Fort Collins, Greeley and Cheyenne that plenty of them commute, and far enough out on the prairie that the town still feels like what it was built to be: a place where grain, cattle and rail lines met.
How a grain buyer got a town named after him
The rails came first. The Denver Pacific laid track through here in 1869 on its way to Cheyenne, and the siding picked up a series of names — High Land, then Burghdorf (spelled a few ways), after a railroad man killed at the crossing. In the 1880s it was a cattle-shipping point for the nearby Wyatt Brothers ranch. What turned a siding into a town was Alexander Ault, a Fort Collins flour-mill owner and grain buyer who, in a year when the bottom fell out, bought up the local wheat harvest and kept a good many farmers from going under. The post office took his name on March 29, 1898; the town incorporated as Bergdorf in 1901 and became the Town of Ault in 1904. From then on the story is potatoes, sugar beets, irrigation ditches from the Water Supply and Storage Company, and a grain elevator by the tracks. The old concrete elevator still stands over the Union Pacific line — you can see it from most of downtown, and it's the first thing you'd draw if someone asked you to sketch the place.
First Street: antiques, a cinnamon roll, and a caboose
Ault's downtown is essentially 1st Street, and 1st Street is essentially antiques. This is a genuine antique-hunting stop for the whole northern Front Range: JR's Antiques & Etc. at 213 1st has been in the same building for a quarter century and leans toward glassware, pottery and jewelry, while Jen's Antique Mall across the way at 220 1st packs more than fifty vendors' booths under one roof. A Saturday morning here is a slow shuffle from shop to shop with people from Fort Collins and Cheyenne who drove down specifically to poke through it all.
The other reason people drive down is Gray's Cafe, at 200 1st Street. It's the diner every small town wishes it had — breakfast all day, biscuits and gravy, chicken fried steak, burritos smothered in green chili — and it is famous for exactly one thing: cinnamon rolls the size of a hubcap. Ordering one for the table is the polite move; ordering one for yourself is a commitment. At the corner where 1st Street meets Highway 85 sits Caboose Park, and the caboose is not just decoration. Union Pacific Caboose No. 25400, built in 1959, was the very first of a hundred Class CA-7 all-steel cabooses UP built, one of only three of its kind left in Colorado, and it's listed on the Colorado State Register of Historic Properties. The park doubles as the site of the farmers market and the town-wide garage sale.
The soldier in Liberty Park
A block or so from the antique shops, Liberty Park is the town's green square, and its memorial is worth a minute of quiet. Joe P. Martinez was born in Taos, New Mexico, in 1920, and moved to Ault as a small boy in 1927 when his father came for farm work; he went to school here and worked the fields around town. On May 26, 1943, as a private with the 32nd Infantry on Attu in the Aleutians, he led two assaults up a snowbound pass into Japanese machine-gun positions and was mortally wounded at the last foxhole. He became the first Hispanic American soldier to receive the Medal of Honor in World War II. On November 11 of that year the Army presented the medal to his family in Ault, and he was buried with full honors in the Ault Cemetery. A bronze statue of him stands in town, and elsewhere in Colorado a Denver park, an Army Reserve center and a DAV chapter carry his name.
Huskies on Friday night
Ault is the seat of the Weld RE-9 school district, and Highland High School on West 1st Street is the gravitational center of the place. Highland was formed in 1963 when the Ault, Pierce, Nunn and Carr schools consolidated, which is why the Huskies — green, white and gold — belong to a stretch of Highway 85 and Highway 14 rather than to Ault alone. With roughly 290 students, everyone plays something, everyone knows who's playing, and a Friday football game against a Patriot League rival pulls in the whole valley of towns. Trivia for the visitor: parts of the 1977 basketball movie One on One, with Robby Benson, were shot at Highland High, so the gym has already been to Hollywood.
The Fall Festival, and the road east
The big weekend is the Ault Fall Festival, held the first weekend of August (fall arrives early on the calendar out here). The parade lines up on Alpine and comes down 3rd Street and Highway 14, the antique engine show fills the school parking lot with popping hit-and-miss motors, and Liberty Park turns into food booths, vendors, live music and street dancing that runs from morning to well after dark. The 2025 theme was "Pioneers & Plows," which tells you how the town sees itself.
Ault is also mile zero of the Pawnee Pioneer Trails Scenic Byway, 128 miles east through Briggsdale, Grover and Raymer to Fort Morgan and Sterling. Within a half hour of leaving town you're on the Pawnee National Grassland, and by the end of the gravel spur you're standing under the Pawnee Buttes — two sandstone towers rising about 250 feet off the shortgrass prairie, with pronghorn and prairie dogs and hawks for company. If Ault is where the Front Range gives way to the plains, the Buttes are what the plains were hiding.
Ault grew almost a quarter between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, and there are new rooftops on the edges of town where the beet fields used to start. But the elevator still stands over the tracks, the cinnamon rolls at Gray's are still the size of a hubcap, and the sign at the edge of town still makes its little joke.
Take Ault home
The elevator, the caboose, the cinnamon roll — that's the Ault we had in mind when we put it on a mug. Something to hold onto while the cinnamon roll cools.