Colorado License Plates Used to Tell People Where You Were From
In Colorado, there are so many variations of license plates nowadays that it is easy to lose track. Vanity plates, collector's plates, plates with your favorite Colorado sports team, you name it, the list is nearly infinite.
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One of my all-time favorite license plates in Colorado was the "Denim" plate. The Colorado Denim plate was issued from July 1992 to December 1999 according to Wikipedia. To this day, you still might happen to see one of these plates on the road as they are still being re-validated.
If you have never seen a Colorado Denim plate or want to take a trip down memory lane, you can find them on eBay.
These Colorado Denim plates used to take the guesswork out of where the car came from because the county of issuance was embossed on the bottom of the plate. Well before Colorado had denim plates, there was another way to tell where a car was from based on its license plate.
The Pueblo County Historical Society posted a throwback in March of the Colorado Auto License Designations and we thought it was pretty interesting.
Northern Colorado Counties would have had the following letters on their license plates:
- Larimer - LU-MK
- Weld - HY-JW
Denver County used to have the largest designations with AA through GN. Fredel Wiant commented on the post by the Pueblo Historical Society saying:
Before that, counties were designated by numbers: Denver was 1, Pueblo 2, El Paso 4, Otero 9 are some I remember. Numbers were assigned based on population and, yes, Pueblo was larger than El Paso. The order was kept when the change was made to the letter system above.
See the full post on the Pueblo Historical Society on Facebook.