Bromley/Koizuma-Hishinuma Farm
Chicago-Colorado Colony
The Chicago-Colorado Colony (1871–73) established the city of Longmont near the confluence of St. Vrain and Left Hand Creeks in 1871. Financed by wealthy Chicagoans and consisting mostly of immigrants from the Midwest, the colony was an agricultural…
Colorado’s Great Plains
Dearfield
Harms Farm
Harms Farm is a historic agricultural property about two and a half miles north of Paoli in Phillips County. The 160-acre section around the main farmstead, which lies on the west side of County Road 21 between County Roads 30 and 32, was first claimed…
Hover Home and Farmstead
The Hover Home and Farmstead is a historic mansion and agricultural property on the west edge of Longmont. Retired pharmacist Charles Hover and his wife, Katherine, bought the farm in 1902 and built the mansion in 1913–14. Over the next several decades,…
Irrigation in Colorado
The tension between aridity and irrigated agriculture has been a defining characteristic of Colorado for much of its modern history. On average, the state receives less than fifteen inches of annual precipitation, making it the seventh driest state in…
Logan County
Longmont
Milne Farm
Nathan Meeker
Oliver Toussaint Jackson
Oliver Toussaint “O. T.” Jackson (1862–1948) was an entrepreneur and prominent member of black communities in Denver and Boulder during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1910 he founded Dearfield, an-all black agricultural settlement…
Oltjenbruns Farm
Oltjenbruns Farm is a historic agricultural property about two and a half miles southwest of Amherst in Phillips County. The 320 acres around the main farmstead, which lies on the west side of County Road 49 just north of Highway 23, was first claimed by…
Phillips County
Rock Ledge Ranch (Buena Vista)
The Bee Family Farm
Washington County
Yuma County
“Great American Desert”
Early nineteenth century Army explorers Zebulon Pike and Stephen H. Long conceptualized the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains as the “Great American Desert.” Long’s report called it “unfit for cultivation,” while Pike compared it to “the sandy…