Grant-Kohrs Ranch Foundation

About the cottonwood trees along Main in the early photos. It's interesting that the city planted them so early, as a stroke of civic pride, in order to beautify and shade the street. There were already some sizable trees by around 1890, as we can see in this photo, so they must have been planted in the 1870s sometime, for them to get that big already. However, the city may have discovered, by 1900 or so, that cottonwood roots are devastating to sidewalks and water systems. We can already see, in a couple of these photos, the progressive elimination of trees in front of where the Coleman Bldg. went up. Inevitably trees vanished entirely from the commercial stretch of Main. The same trend happened in the older residential areas, especially east of Main. When I was a kid, there were still some grand old cottonwood shade trees along those streets. But roots had buckled the sidewalks wildly, and eventually these trees were all removed. Today people know not to plant cottonwoods unless they can be given lots of room.