Due to a strong demand for workers at many of Fort Morgan’s industry plant locations,
the city welcomes a large (and always growing) immigrant population.
This trend started 100 years ago with the building of the Western Sugar Cooperative.
Joshua Hardin

Viewed from a satellite, the farm fields surrounding Fort Morgan appear as a ribbon of green on a swatch of brown. South Platte River waters fill the canals and reservoirs built by the city’s founders, who dubbed their northeast Plains community the “Fort Morgan Oasis.”

Viewed from Interstate 76, the 210-foot-tall silos of the Western Sugar Cooperative dominate the Fort Morgan skyline, symbolizing the towering importance of agriculture to the city of nearly 12,000 residents. Morgan County as a whole ranks fourth out of the state’s 64 counties in agricultural production.

As the silos come into view on the interstate, so does a highway sign proclaiming another source of pride: “Fort Morgan – Boyhood Home of Glenn Miller,” leader of one of the most popular big bands of the swing era in the 1930s and ‘40s.

While swing aficionados still make pilgrimages to the Glenn Miller exhibit at the Fort Morgan Museum, a new contender recently emerged for the title of Fort Morgan’s biggest celebrity: ice cream shop owner Gloria Mosqueda.

At Mosqueda Delicacies Ice Cream & More on Main Street, as many as 20 customers a day ask for and get a selfie with Mosqueda. The cheerful Mexican American grandmother became an overnight sensation in April when she and her shop appeared on an episode of the HGTV show Hometown Takeover.

Mosqueda’s family had watched for years as other families wept with joy on TV when they saw their homes made new after a TV crew’s extreme makeover. When it was the Mosquedas’ turn, there was no holding back tears when the HGTV crew revealed her shop’s makeover.

“We all cried on camera” on a rainy Reveal Day – the day the TV crew filmed the family seeing the shop for the first time in three months, said Mosqueda, who is co-owner with her sister-in-law Blanca. After HGTV viewers saw the episode, lines of customers started forming around the block.

Hometown Takeover devoted its entire second season to Fort Morgan, remodeling 18 total homes and businesses. The show chose Fort Morgan from the 5,000 towns that applied.

Across the season’s six episodes, it highlighted some of the things that made the city stand out from the pack: its ethnically diverse population, a uniquely historic bridge and, of course, Fort Morgan’s original biggest celebrity.



Fort Morgan is famously known as the boyhood home of musician Glenn Miller.
He is recognized throughout the city, including at a park that carries his name.
Various community music events are held in the space throughout the year.
Joshua Hardin

Though no longer the household name he once was, Glenn Miller was one of the biggest superstars of the 1940s. As leader of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, he received the music industry’s first gold record for selling more than 1 million copies of his 1941 hit “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” RCA Victor gave him a spray-painted gold record because the gold record award had not yet been invented.

Miller died in 1944 when the plane he was in disappeared over the English Channel, but he lives on in Fort Morgan’s memory. The beating heart of Fort Morgan is downtown’s Glenn Miller Park, where music rings out year-round. The park hosts Thursday Night Live, a weekly summer festival that attracts local bands and draws a crowd of families from across the 1,291 square miles of Morgan County, kids and adults alike happy for live music and food trucks. The park also hosts an annual music festival, Bobstock, in July, which features headliner bands such as Starship and 38 Special.

Platte Valley Band – a community band of teachers, lawyers, dentists, doctors, IT professionals playing wind instruments and percussion – performs three or four seasonal concerts in the park.

The band’s conductor for the past 20 years has been Chuck Morgan, retired music teacher and basketball coach. Morgan helps a band member transition from one instrument to other, for example from the slide of a trombone to the fingering of a French horn. That experience gives Morgan special appreciation for what Glenn Miller accomplished as a band leader.

“He was in the genius category,” Morgan said. “The style and the quality of music – it just doesn’t get old.”

Platte Valley Band played Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” for HGTV cameras. Hometown Takeover honored Miller by installing three musical sculptures in the downtown park named for him: a treble clef, which resembles a fancy ampersand; a quaver, or eighth note; and a crotchet, or quarter note.

Miller left Fort Morgan to attend the University of Colorado Boulder in 1923 – the same year the Western Sugar Cooperative silo was built. The silo stores sugar beets from 850 growers, who own the operation. The Fort Morgan sugar processing plant is the only one in Colorado still operating; in sugar’s Colorado heyday, plants operated from Fort Collins to Rocky Ford. The plant employs 90 seasonal and more than 100 full-time staff.

The Western Sugar silo stands next to two other agribusinesses in Fort Morgan that are among the city’s biggest employers. Cargill’s plant supplies processed beef to the Colorado locations of Walmart, Kroger, Costco and McDonalds. It employs 2,100. Leprino Foods supplies the mozzarella cheese that tops the pizzas of most of the best-known chains – Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Little Caesars, Papa John’s – and frozen brands – DiGiorno, Jack’s, Tombstone and Tony’s. It employs about 380.

Driven by the constant need for workers at the plants, Fort Morgan has a large and growing immigrant population. Immigrants from Mexico first started working at Western Sugar in the 1920s. Latin American immigrants are still moving to Fort Morgan, joined in more recent decades by immigrants from Africa.

Houefa Akpamoli and her husband, Arnold Akele, immigrants from Benin in West Africa, came to Fort Morgan when Houefa found work Cargill, and Arnold found work at Leprino Foods.

The Cargill job gave Houefa a foothold in a community where she spoke heavily accented English and knew no one when she arrived. Houefa is now the health equity manager for the Northeast Colorado Health Department. She ran for Fort Morgan City Council in 2021 and lost. She says she’ll keep running until she wins, or until a new generation runs to bring immigrant representation to city government.

Houefa’s new kitchen in her home was one of Hometown Takeover’s makeover projects. She makes friends through hospitality and food, so the television crew doubled the kitchen’s size and installed new appliances. They painted the walls orange – not exactly Houefa’s first choice.

“I didn’t hate orange, but I never liked it,” Houefa said. But more important than color is the sense of community that the bigger kitchen makes possible.

In Fort Morgan, “a sense of belonging” is important to the residents. Houefa’s kitchen serves as a place to help integrate newcomers who, like her, are immigrants. While her immediate family is “African,” she considers all members of the Fort Morgan community her family. “I cook for them.”



The Platte Valley Band, with its longtime conductor Chuck Morgan (front row, center, with baton),
invites community members to learn how to play new instruments and perform in Glenn Miller Park.
Platte Valley Band

When the crew from Hometown Takeover first talked with Fort Morgan Mayor Lyn Deal, they told her one of the things that intrigued them most about the city was its historic Rainbow Arch Bridge, which had been preserved thanks to efforts by Deal and other community members.

When Deal moved to Fort Morgan in 1968 at age 22, she immediately wanted to know everything about the place. “When I go to a town, I want to know the history of it,” she said. But Deal knew nothing about the shut-down bridge over the South Platte River that once connected Fort Morgan to northern Morgan County. Pouring herself into researching it, she discovered that the overlooked bridge was, in fact, an engineering treasure.

In the Denver archives of Colorado Preservation Inc., she found that the Rainbow Arch Bridge is one of only a few Colorado bridges – the Royal Gorge Bridge is another – listed in Great American Bridges and Dams, a national guide that puts Rainbow Arch Bridge in the same company as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge.

The bridge’s unique feature is that, as a suspension bridge, its arches point up, not down. Arches on the underside of the bridge would have caught river debris, such as downed trees, raising the water level and endangering bridge traffic. The 11 topside arches on each side of the quarter-mile span give the bridge higher clearance. This purely functional design came with an aesthetic bonus: The arches mimic the shape of a rainbow’s arc.

An experimental bridge when it was completed in 1923, Rainbow Arch was like no other in Colorado. It withstood the force of two major floods 30 years apart in its first half century. Marking its 100th birthday this year, the bridge is bringing national attention to Fort Morgan, but only after enduring hardships its builders could not have anticipated.

Designed to be just wide enough for passing Model Ts, Rainbow Arch Bridge proved too narrow for modern two-way traffic. And the freeze-thaw cycle weakened the concrete at the edges, so it was shut down in 1967.

Deal included the bridge in her successful application for establishing the Pawnee Pioneer Trails Scenic and Historic Byway, a 128-mile route that includes Pawnee Buttes. The Colorado Department of Transportation approved the route in 1992. The renewed Rainbow Arch Bridge reopened to pedestrian and bike traffic in 1995.

At the foot of the bridge, Hometown Takeover installed a welcome sign that labels Fort Morgan the “Oasis on the Plains,” hearkening back to the community’s nickname in its earliest days.

When explorer Stephen Harriman Long traveled through northeastern Colorado in 1820, he described the land as the “Great American Desert.” Fort Morgan sprouted up as a military post in 1864 to protect settlers and gold seekers on the Overland Trail. The post stood in what a newspaper called “a plain sparsely covered with buffalo and other grasses and cactus plants.”

Settlers who arrived after the post closed built a series of canals and reservoirs that turned Morgan County into a highly productive farming region. With water from the South Platte River and tributaries like Bijou and San Arroyo creeks, the town flourished, and flourishes still.

Its water also drives visitors to the city. The swimming pool at Riverside Park hosts state and regional swim meets. The prospect of relief from summer heat lures Fort Morgan residents a half-hour drive north of town to Jackson Lake State Park with a clean, sandy, uncrowded beach with warm, clear water. Owners of private homes next door keep an eye out for trash and trouble.



The annual Fall Harvest Car Show packs downtown Fort Morgan with classic cars and the people
who love them. This is just one of many hometown events that bring the community together
to celebrate the life and growth in the “Oasis on the Plains.”
Morgan County Tourism

An off-camera contributor to Hometown Takeover projects, Jason Labonte constructed the oasis welcome sign and many other HGTV projects.

Labonte helped craft, finish and install a specialty Dutch door for a local horse ranch that got the HGTV treatment; he provided custom milled elm boards for Zazzy’s Cafe; he created live edge ash countertops for a kitchen renovation; and he built the town sign, including its wooden rainbow using cedar he harvested.

Labonte left a career in aerospace engineering, and his wife, Leah, quit her job with the National Western Stock Show to move their family from Denver to Morgan County to raise their kids in a small town and run their family business, Just Rustic. The company makes and sells custom wooden furniture.

Demand for it is growing among the affluent community in Morgan County, fueling an unending search for wood. Labonte can’t drive anywhere without scouting for black walnut, aspen and more. “It drives my wife crazy,” he said.

The Labontes recently purchased a building in downtown Fort Morgan from Jim Forstedt, owner of Fort Morgan Furniture and the self-described “old-timer” of downtown. The old-timer is helping a new generation of entrepreneurs like Labontes.

Gloria Mosqueda of newfound HGTV fame is another. Mosqueda was born in Durango, Mexico, and emigrated with her family to America at age 4. She attended school in Fort Morgan and now has a 6-year-old grandchild. Forstedt self-financed Mosqueda’s acquisition of the building where Forstedt’s late father ran his furniture business.

“When Gloria told me what they wanted to put in the building, I had doubts,” Forstedt said. Their hard work changed his perspective. “They worked their tails off. Upstairs, where they run the ice cream machines, it looks like a surgical suite; it’s all white. I could not be more proud of those kids.”

Mosqueda confirms that she needs at least three people at the counter handling walk-in business when, before the shop’s TV appearance, one worker sufficed. The Mosquedas also picked up the pace of their ice cream production, from twice a month to twice a week.

Gloria and and her sister Blanca enjoy their remodeled workspace. Gloria especially loves the colorful mural the crew arranged for one wall of the shop. Blanca appreciates the waffle-cone pattern on another wall. “I wouldn’t change anything,” Gloria said. “They did everything perfect.”

Forstedt’s furniture store and Mosqueda’s ice cream shop share parking in the back. Mosqueda buys furniture from Forstedt and refers ice cream customers to his business.

Forstedt keeps an autograph book, and he asked Gloria to sign it. She did, dedicating her signature “to my biggest fan – biggest underlined,” Forstedt said. “Which is true. I am bigger. I’ve put on 20 pounds” since Mosqueda moved in.

With his favorite ice cream shop to his left, a custom furniture store coming soon to his right, and music playing in Glenn Miller Park just a few blocks away, Forstedt is happy to call Fort Morgan home.