Wadsworth Boulevard is one of the busiest roads spanning the west Denver suburbs of Arvada, Lakewood north to Broomfield and south to Littleton.  The road was named in honor of Benjamin Franklin Wadsworth, the first Postmaster of Arvada who migrated to Colorado around the time of the 1859 gold rush and after a short stint around Empire, settled with his wife near Ralston Point, now Historic Old Town Arvada. 

Wadsworth purchased a land claim in 1863 and by 1869 had moved his family into this log cabin.

Wadsworth developed a plat for a town of nine square blocks on his 160 acres, and his wife Mary Ann named the new town Arvada after her brother-in-law, Hiram Arvada Haskins. 

The Wadsworth’s had immigrated from New York and their family roots extended from Hartford, Connecticut.  They were some of the earliest puritan immigrants to New England.  Benjamin Franklin Wadsworth  was a descendant of William Wadsworth, who immigrated to Massachusetts in 1632 from Northampton England.

Scanning a list of surnames in our Barkey family history you will see that the list included 23 people named Wadsworth and there he is…William Wadsworth, born in Northampton England in 1594 and buried in Hartford, Connecticut in 1675.  Our grandparents, Francis Clay Barkey and Belle Stanley Barkey had moved to Colorado from Nebraska in 1917.   The Stanley family came from Hartford, Connecticut where our ancestor Captain John Stanley was a founder.   In Hartford, one of Belle Stanley’s great, great grandfathers, Samuel Stanley, married Joanna Goodman in 1754.    Joanna was a daughter of Joanna Wadsworth, the great granddaughter of William Wadsworth.

So now we have a new appreciation of our cousin’s road.