Sloan’s Lake, better known as Sloans Lake, is a body of water and park as well as a neighborhood in Denver, CO. The neighborhood is located on the northwest side of town.
Sloan’s Lake is the focus of Sloan’s Lake Park, which is taken care of by the Denver Parks and Rec Department.
Sloan’s Lake is located way outside Denver and next to neighborhoods like Lakewood, Edgewater, and Wheat Ridge.
We don’t know how long it will take for the lake to replenish, but the approximate boundaries are Sherdian Blvd to the west, 17th Ave to the south, Raleigh St. on its east side and 26th Ave on its north side. There aren’t any tributary streams that feed into it.
Whether Sloan Lake’s history will ever be confirmed is unclear, but with settlement of the Denver area during the mid-late 19th century, there was no lake in this location.
South Golden Road, which links up Denver and the western suburb of Golden, crosses through the area where Sloan Lake now is.
Thomas M. Sloan received a certificate that gave him the legal title to use this land in 1866, under the Southern Homestead Act.
Apparently, there’s this old legend that has been going around for decades about how a guy named Sloan dug a well on his land and he ended up pulling water from some underground aquifer. The next morning after he woke up, part of his fields were suddenly covered in water.
When the water from this burst, for example, it flooded part of Colfax Avenue and realigned South Golden Road which would then become the new east-west thoroughfare.
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Bill Turner says the lake appeared sometime between when he left for Kansas in June 1861 and when he returned in early 1863.
It’s possible that Sloan had been farming on the land before they applied for a patent. However, it’s unlikely that the land which was underwater would have been granted a patent as it was just as unlikely that Sloan would have asked for one in the first place.
The lake was about 200 acres (0.81 km2) in size and extended beyond its current borders, but some portions were filled in the area west of Sheridan Blvd and north of 25th Ave. There used to be an amusement park near the lake.
Opened to the public on 27 June 1881, it was the first amusement park to be built west of the Mississippi River. It burned down in 1908 and was rebuilt as Luna Park that same year. They had a lot of mishaps and it competed with other amusement parks nearby.
Cooper Lake serves as a separate body of water southeast of Sloan’s Lake. The Works Projects Administration successfully established jurisdiction over Cooper Lake in the 1930s and designed plans where channels were constructed beneath the surface of the water.
The merging of Sloan’s Lake with Cooper Lake created one body of water. 177 acres make up the present-day combined Sloan’s Lake and Cooper Lake.