Lone Tree to Central City: A name change, a courtroom battle, and a legacy that still grows
On this very week, 150 years ago, a solitary tree on the prairie fell not in the physical sense—it had done that long before—but in the spiritual one. Lone Tree, the name that once stood as a landmark on a map and in the hearts of settlers, was officially replaced by Central City. And while it may have taken an act of law to make it so, what happened in early 1875 was about far more than a name…