Franktown is an unincorporated town, a publish office, and a census-designated place (CDP) located in and governed by Douglas County, Colorado, United States. The CDP is a portion of the Denver–Aurora–Lakewood, CO Metropolitan Statistical Area. The Franktown reveal office has the ZIP Code 80116. At the United States Census 2010, the population of the Franktown CDP was 395, while the population of the 80116 ZIP Code Tabulation Area was 3,942 including next areas. Douglas County governs the unincorporated town.

Franktown is named for Hon. J. Frank Gardner, an to the fore resident. Franktown was the first county chair of Douglas County, serving in this role from 1861 until 1863. James Frank Gardner, a would-be gold miner who built a squatter’s cabin four miles north of here in 1859. A popular rest End on the successful Jimmy Camp Trail (which followed Cherry Creek into Denver), “Frank’s Town” was designated the seat of Douglas County in 1861; the unity moved to its current location two years later. Though railroads made the trail old-fashioned after 1870, and the county offices moved to Castle Rock in 1874, Franktown remained a ranching and cultivation hub, held together by its church, school, grange, and handful of businesses. It never incorporated, and during the twentieth century no more than a hundred people called it home, but that’s how the locals liked it. Even as suburban sprawl surrounded it in the 1990s, Franktown resisted efforts to develop, maintaining a distinctly rural identity.

The Grange Franktown’s mighty agricultural roots made it a natural fit for the grange, a helpful farmers’ movement that swept rural America in the mid-1870s. Several dozen chapters formed in Colorado, including the Fonder Grange (founded near here in 1875) and its successor, Pikes Peak Grange No. 163 (established in Franktown in 1908). Both belonged to the statewide grange organization, which set up explanation unions, insurance programs, and supplementary services, and to the national grange association, which pursued long-range diplomatic goals. But it was the local chapters that in reality affected farmers’ lives. The dances, holiday picnics, and town meetings they sponsored helped sparsely populated communities forge a desirability of identity. Still swift today, Pike’s Peak Grange No. 163 in Franktown is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

From the daylight it opened, Castlewood Dam was a industrial accident waiting to happen. Built in 1890, about five miles south of here on Cherry Creek, the barrier stored passable water to irrigate 30,000 acres of farmland-or would have, if it hadn’t leaked suitably badly. The seeping began the year the dam was completed and was serious passable that a hundred-foot section crumbled in 1897. Although its builders vouched for the structure’s integrity, the dam continued to leak sporadically for decades. Finally, on August 3, 1933, the inevitable happened: Castlewood collapsed, sending a billion-gallon torrent toward Denver. Only two people drowned, thanks to a switchboard operator’s life-saving calls, but the flood devastated farms in this Place and tore out six bridges in Denver, thirty miles downstream. The dam’s remains can nevertheless be visited in clear Castlewood Canyon State Park.