Union Colony

The Union Colony of Colorado (also called the Greeley Colony and The Union Temperance Colony) was a 19th-century private enterprise formed to promote agricultural settlements in the South Platte River valley in the Colorado Territory. Organization of the colony began in October 1869 by Nathan Meeker in order to establish a religiously oriented utopian community of "high moral standards". The colony was founded in March 1870 at the site of present-day Greeley, Colorado. Union Colony was financially backed and promoted by New York Tribune editor, Horace Greeley, a prominent advocate of the settlement of the American West. The homesteaded colony greatly advanced irrigation usage in present-day northern Colorado, demonstrating the viability of cultivation at a time when agriculture was emerging as a rival to mining as the principal basis for the territorial economy.

Horace Greeley had journeyed west in 1859 at the height of the Colorado Gold Rush, going from Denver to Fort Laramie via the Overland Stage Line before continuing on to California. Greeley's route took him up the valleys of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre near the eventual location of the colony.

In 1869 Greeley sent Meeker, then employed as the agricultural editor of the Tribune, to the Colorado Territory to seek out a location for a colony to promote settlement in the West. Meeker returned to New York City in the autumn of 1869, reporting that the South Platte Valley presented a good opportunity for the colony. In October, Meeker began organizing the enterprise, and on December 14, 1869, he placed an advertisement in the Tribune calling for volunteers to join him in the new venture. Meeker's advertisement specifically sought volunteers of high moral standards, who were literate and adherents to the tenets of the Temperance movements. The cost of membership for those accepted to the colony was set at $155. Of the more than 3000 people who responded, Meeker selected 700 applications as prospective colonists, ninety of whom later backed out.

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