Greeley

Greeley is a city in northern Colorado, on the plains east of the Rocky Mountains near the Cache la Poudre River. It carries the name of Horace Greeley, the New York newspaper editor who urged young Americans to move west.

Nathan Meeker, the agricultural editor of Greeley's paper, led a group of settlers from the East to the site in 1870 and founded the Union Colony, a cooperative farming town where the sale of alcohol was banned. The colony dug irrigation canals from the Poudre River, among the first large irrigation works in Colorado, and turned the dry plain into fields of potatoes, wheat and sugar beets. A teachers' college opened in the late 1880s and grew into the University of Northern Colorado. James Michener studied and taught there, and he later set his novel Centennial in the farm country around the city.

JBS USA, the American branch of a Brazilian meat company, has its head office in Greeley, where it processes beef from the cattle feedlots of the region. Leprino Foods makes mozzarella cheese for pizza at a plant in the city. Dairy farms, cattle feedlots and fields of corn and onions cover much of the surrounding county.

The Greeley Stampede, held each summer since the early 1920s, brings professional rodeo, concerts and a parade to the city around the Fourth of July. The Meeker Home Museum keeps the adobe house that the founder built for his family in the year the colony began. Centennial Village Museum gathers houses and shops from the early decades of the region in a park near the river.