Colorado Springs city directories online 1879-1922 are available here. The digital city directories are a collaborative effort between the Pikes Peak Genealogical Society and Special Collections at the Pikes Peak Library District.
Visit this page and click on the date links at bottom to access the directories. The first city directory for Colorado Springs was published in 1879, and was published biennially until 1899. After 1900, directories for Colorado Springs were published annually and included a cross-reference index for street addresses. The digitized Colorado Springs city directories are in PDF format by year. You may browse page by page or search for a particular name or keyword.

Special Collections at the Pikes Peak Library District houses city directories for Colorado Springs published from 1879 to the present. The first city directory for Colorado Springs was compiled and published by W.H.H. Raper & Co. in 1879. Subsequent editions were published by S.N. Francis, the Out West Printing and Stationary Co., the Giles Directory Co., and R.L. Polk & Co., who continues to publish them today. The directories were published, roughly, every other year until 1900, when they began to be published annually.

City directories can provide valuable genealogical and historical information about people and the communities in which they lived. They list residents alphabetically by surname and usually indicate a person’s address, occupation and spouse’s name. Directories may also contain business listings and advertisements; a brief community description; information about local, state and national government; listings of schools and colleges, clubs, organizations, secret societies and churches. After 1900, in Colorado Springs, the directories also included a cross-reference index to street addresses. The Colorado Springs city directories also include listings for surrounding communities, such as Old Colorado City and Manitou.

The Colorado Springs city directories from 1879 through 1922 have been digitized, with the gracious help of dedicated volunteers from the Pikes Peak Genealogical Society, and are provided here in .pdf format. The text of the directories has been scanned with optical character recognition (OCR) software, so that they may be searched using a .pdf reader. The OCR process is not perfect, especially with older texts and fonts, so the directories should be browsed if a search does not turn up intended results. City directories published after 1922 may still be covered by U.S. copyright and are not included here. The originals, however, may be viewed in the Special Collections department of the Pikes Peak Library District. Later editions of the Colorado Springs city directories, up to 1963, can be found in the HeritageQuest database.

I began my professional library career in the Local History and Genealogy Department of the Pikes Peak Library District and was delighted to speak at PPGS last spring to celebrate their 30th anniversary. Congratulations to everyone involved on this great project to increase access to Colorado Springs resources for genealogists and local historians.