The agricultural extension service in Colorado (1887–present) links individuals, organizations, and communities with research experts to address agrarian issues. These issues encompass rural problems associated with farming and ranching, as well as urban…

Located near Bromley Lane and South Fifteenth Avenue in Brighton, the Bromley/Koizuma-Hishinuma Farm is significant for its association with an early Brighton civic leader as well as later Japanese American farmers in Adams County. Emmet Bromley first…

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…

Eastern Colorado, bordered by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the west, Kansas on the east, and the corners of Nebraska and Oklahoma, constitutes a portion of the Great Plains. It is the agricultural heartland of Colorado. This semiarid region is…

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…

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…

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,…

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, named for Civil War General John A. Logan, covers 1,845 miles of the Great Plains in northeast Colorado. It is bordered to the north by the state of Nebraska, to the east by Sedgwick and Phillips Counties, to the southeast by Yuma County,…

Longmont is a city of about 92,000 along the Front Range in eastern Boulder County. Named after the prominent Longs Peak to the west, the city was founded in 1871 by members of the Chicago-Colorado Colony, near the confluence of Left Hand and St. Vrain…

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…

Nathan Cook Meeker (1817–1879) was an agriculturalist, newspaper editor, and Indian agent. He founded the Union Colony at present-day Greeley as well as the city’s oldest newspaper, the Greeley Tribune. In 1878 he was appointed Indian agent of the…

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 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 covers 688 square miles on the Great Plains of northeastern Colorado. It has a population of 4,349, more than half of whom live in the county seat of Holyoke. Other communities include Haxton (pop. 946) and Amherst (58). Frenchman Creek…

Established in 1887 by Ernest Wilber, Rock Ledge Ranch is a historic ranch four miles west of Buena Vista in the Upper Arkansas Valley (17975 Co Rd 338, Buena Vista, CO 81211). Since 1908 the ranch has been owned and operated by multiple generations of…

The Bee Family Farm is a historic farm located between Fort Collins and Wellington. In operation as a working farm since 1894, it is now an outdoor museum that preserves and displays the family’s historic artifacts, buildings, and fields to help visitors…

Washington County, named for the first US president, is a county of 2,524 square miles on Colorado’s eastern Great Plains. It is bordered to the north by Logan County, to the east by Yuma County, to the south by Kit Carson and Lincoln Counties, and to…

Yuma County covers 2,369 square miles in northeast Colorado. A part of the state’s Great Plains region, the county includes the lowest point in Colorado: 3,315 feet, along the Arikaree River at the Kansas border. Yuma County is bordered to the east by…

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…