Established on May 5, 1910, by a young entrepreneur named Oliver Toussaint Jackson, Dearfield was an agricultural colony for Black people about twenty-five miles southeast of Greeley. For two decades nearly 700 Black people worked to transform the…

Early colonists occupied Colorado’s rich and ecologically diverse landscapes in the waning millennia of our planet’s most recent major Ice Age, the Pleistocene, between 14,000 and 12,000 years. Our best-documented evidence for Colorado’s earliest hunter…

In the summer of 1837, Henry Fraeb and Peter Sarpy arrived at a location on the South Platte River a few miles north of present-day Fort Lupton. They arrived with $10,909.75 worth of goods for trade with the Cheyenne and Arapaho who frequented the area…

Louis Vasquez and Andrew Sublette operated the fur-trading post Fort Vasquez from 1835 to 1842. After ruthless competition and changing trade patterns caused the pair to leave the fort, it served as a landmark along the South Platte River Trail before…

Greeley is a growing community of 100,000 people along the Front Range in northeastern Colorado. Founded as an agricultural colony in 1870, the city has an economic, political, and cultural reach that extends far beyond its municipal borders. Greeley is…

The Beaux-Arts Greeley Tribune Building opened in 1929 to house the operations of the Greeley Tribune, Weld County’s oldest newspaper. From 1937 until the mid-1950s, the building also contained the offices of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy…

The Jurgens Archaeological Site is a Paleo-Indian period (before 6000 BCE) bison processing site that dates to about 7120 BCE and includes the remains of at least sixty-eight bison spread across three separate camps. Located about nine miles east of…

Louis Vasquez (1798–1868) was a fur trapper and mountain man active in Colorado during the 1820s and 1830s. He reportedly constructed Fort Convenience and a hunter’s cabin that predated the majority of settlement in the region. One of the Colorado fur…

First established in the 1880s as a homestead associated with the Greeley agricultural colony, Milne Farm sits just west of Lucerne in Weld County. The Milne family has owned the farm continuously for more than 125 years and has long been involved in…

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…

The Painter was a prosperous ranching family in Colorado during the early 1900s. Even though ranching went into universal decline following a brutal winter in 1886, the Painter family remained successful due to equal parts luck, persistence, and…

Weld County is the largest county in northeastern Colorado, covering 4,017 square miles of the Great Plains and the South Platte River valley. One of the original seventeen counties in the Colorado Territory, it is named for Louis Ledyard Weld, the first…

The Wilbur Thomas Shelter Archaeological Site is a rockshelter in northwest Weld County featuring evidence of at least six intermittent occupations stretching over 8,500 years. David A. Breternitz and graduate students from the University of Colorado…