On a mild New Year's Day in 1861, a sick schoolteacher named William B. Osborn made camp on the banks of Colorado's Big Thompson River, founding a 165-year family enterprise. Seven generations later, his descendants — Pam and Dale Osborn, with their sons and their families — are still working the same ground. Today the farm is best known for what began almost by accident: a pumpkin patch that Northern Colorado families now measure their autumns by.
A Sick Man's Gamble on the Frontier
William Osborn had trained as a physician in New York State before tuberculosis sent him west in search of dry mountain air, with doctors telling him he did not have long to live. Drawn by the 1859 gold rush, he landed in a mining camp near future Central City, where the miners made him clerk and judge of their rough miners' court. There he witnessed the birth of the water-rights principle — first in time, first in right — that would make irrigated farming possible across the American West.
When the gold thinned, Osborn bought a bounty-land warrant from mustered-out officer Captain Juan Duro, and with it a claim to 160 acres along the Big Thompson. On January 1, 1861, the family arrived — the date the Osborns have kept ever since. They planted the first wheat crop ever grown in Larimer County. An 1864 flood cost them two hogs — nearly everything when all cooking grease and candle fat had to be raised on the place. William outlived his death sentence by decades, into his nineties, becoming Larimer County's first county judge and helping lay out the early irrigation ditches whose lines still make the country green.
Seven Generations, Unbroken
Most family land does not stay in the family. The Osborns did not let go. William's son Milo Y. Osborn ran the county's first corn sheller. Kenneth Osborn rigged a waterwheel to bring electric light to the farmhouse before rural electrification arrived, and patented an automatic irrigation headgate. Clarence Frazer Osborn, born on the farm in 1877 and nearly blind by 1960, dictated the whole family history aloud so his television-age grandchildren would know where they came from.
In 1986 the State of Colorado made it official: Osborn Farm was designated a Colorado Centennial Farm, an honor reserved for land held by one family, without a break, for more than a hundred years. The family calls it Colorado's oldest continuously occupied farm.
The Pumpkins That Started by Accident
Around 1980, Pam Osborn grew a few pumpkins to amuse the children in a neighborhood babysitting arrangement, harvested a bumper crop, and set the extras out by the road for free. People kept leaving money under them anyway. From that beginning grew the tradition the farm is known for today: each fall the family opens the place for pick-your-own pumpkins, and each December for Christmas trees.
The 2026 season opened September 26–27, and the farm is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. through the fall (weather and crop permitting). Admission and parking are free. Pumpkins run 60 cents per pound. Weekends bring hayrides and barrel trains at $3 per rider and a petting zoo at $2 per child, cash only. The farm also sells gourds, mums, corn stalk bundles, straw bales, heirloom corn, and raw farm honey.
A Takeaway for the Rest of Us
Between that warm New Year's Day in 1861 and this one, the country endured a civil war and reinvented itself many times over. And through all of it, in view of the same mountains, there have been Osborns on this ground. A farm does not survive 165 years by luck; it survives because each generation decided the land was worth the work. When a Loveland family picks a pumpkin off the vine this October, they are taking hold of the longest unbroken chain in Colorado farming.
Watch: Osborn Farm's opening-weekend festivities — horse-drawn wagon rides, petting zoo, barrel train, and fields of pumpkins in Loveland, Colorado — a video tour of the farm's fall celebrations.
Music in this post's reel: Kevin MacLeod - Winner Winner! (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 3.0
Sources: The Coloradoan · Osborn Farm · Wanderlog