Founding Union Colony

The founding of Union Colony in 1870 marked a turning point in the Cache la Poudre River Valley. For centuries, these plains had been home to Native peoples and their ancestors, and more recently a crossroads for explorers and traders. When settlers from the eastern United States arrived, they brought with them ambitious visions of community and cultivation, but they soon discovered that life on Colorado’s arid frontier demanded new solutions. Above all, Irrigation would determine whether the colony could survive. This story of water, land, and people remains at the heart of the Cache la Poudre National Heritage Area today.

After the Civil War (1861-1865), the New York Tribune became one of the loudest voices urging Americans to look westward. Its publisher, Horace Greeley (1811-1872), believed the Rocky Mountain West promised health, opportunity, and fertile land for those willing to work it. Through fiery editorials, he painted the West as a place where families could leave behind crowded cities and build new, self-reliant communities. His words struck a chord with war veterans, working-class readers, and would-be homesteaders searching for fresh starts.

Greeley’s call to “Go West” was not just the rhetoric of a removed dreamer. In 1859, during the height of the Colorado Gold Rush, he traveled through the Rockies and along the Front Range, later publishing his experiences in An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859. His vivid accounts of the Cache la Poudre Valley caught the attention of Nathan Meeker (1817-1879), a New York Tribune correspondent that Greeley had once hired to report on the Civil War. Meeker, already fascinated by the social theories of French thinker Charles Fourier, began to imagine a farming colon on the plains where cooperation, temperance, and hard work could shape an ideal community.

Clipped portrait and signature of Horace Greeley from the Library of Congress’ Horace Greeley Papers collection.

1870 photo of Nathan Meeker from the City of Greeley Museums, Permanent Collection/AI-3146

A decade later, Nathan Meeker returned to Colorado as the New York Tribune’s agricultural editor. By 1869 he had developed a detailed plan for a western farming colony and secured Greeley’s support. That December, he published a call in the New York Tribune inviting settlers who shared his ideals of temperance, religious faith, cooperative agriculture, and community spirit. Within months, his bold proposal had set in motion the founding of Union Colony the following spring.

Meeker’s announcement in the New York Tribune sparked immediate interest. Within weeks, about sixty readers gathered with him in New York to discuss the plan. Out of this meeting came the Union Colony Corporation, which began raising money through initiation fees and donations for a land purchase. In February 1870, Meeker and a small group of associates traveled to Colorado Territory to choose a site. After surveying several locations, they selected land along the Cache la Poudre River, about four miles upstream from its meeting with the South Platte.

“Emigration to the West.” New York Tribune, December 4, 1869.

Clipped map of northern central Colorado from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division (1877)

Meeker and his associates secured more than 9,000 acres from the Denver Pacific Railway and negotiated rights to an additional 60,000 acres of public domain through the U.S. General Land Office. By April 1870, the first settlers began to arrive. The reality of the dry plains, however, proved harsher than the idealized vision many had read in the New York Tribune. Some colonists left almost immediately, forfeiting their investments, and about ten percent asked for refunds. Yet by autumn the colony still counted around 500 residents, enough to give Meeker’s cooperative experiment a foothold along the Poudre.