This Colorado city was planned as a utopia
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DENVER (KDVR) — Greeley is known in 2024 as a largely agricultural town, but did you know that it was meant to be an agricultural utopia?
The town was first recognized by the State of Colorado in 1886, but it existed for over a decade before that as a colony of nearly 500 would-be agriculturalists.
Historic civic plan aimed to create a utopia
The town’s name comes from Horace Greeley, a 19th-century newspaper editor and publisher.
This is important because Greeley played an important role in the life of the city’s founder, Nathan Meeker, who worked as an agricultural reporter for Greeley’s newspaper the New York Tribune. The two even drafted a charter for the utopian colony Greeley was supposed to become.
The principles that guided the colony included agriculture, religion, family values and temperance, or abstinence from alcohol.
According to the Colorado Encyclopedia, in 1874, the Cache la Poudre River did not have enough water to supply the town of Greeley due to new arrivals upstream in Fort Collins.
This issue eventually led to the establishment of water law in Colorado, where people are granted rights to water usage based on seniority.
Similar to Denver’s namesake, Mr. Greeley never lived in the town he was named after. However, unlike Denver, he never visited Greeley. He died in 1872, two years after the colony was formed and 14 years before it was officially recognized by the state.
Have you driven on Colorado’s oldest paved road?
Besides its continuing legacy as an important agricultural city in northern Colorado, there is one thing that the “utopia” was founded on that lasted quite a while: Temperance.
While no longer the case, Greeley was a “dry” city, meaning no alcohol was allowed, until the 1970s.
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