Greeley, Colorado: The Town That Almost Became Meeker

Greeley, Colorado, was nearly named Meeker, for the New York Tribune man who organized the colony that built it. He wouldn’t hear of it, so the town got the name of the Tribune’s famous founder, Horace Greeley.

Meeker’s colony, Greeley’s name

Nathan C. Meeker was the Tribune’s agricultural editor. Late in 1869 he published a call in the paper, endorsed by Greeley himself, that opened, “I propose to unite with the proper persons in establishing a colony in Colorado Territory.” The group that answered was organized in New York on December 23, 1869, as the Union Colony. A Colorado newspaper story from April 1870, reprinted in a 1918 University of Colorado collection, lists the officers: Meeker as president, General R. A. Cameron as vice president and Horace Greeley as treasurer.

Meeker, Cameron and H. T. West made up the committee that picked the land on the Cache la Poudre River. Then came the question of a name. David Boyd, a colonist who wrote the town’s history in 1890, says West told him that Cameron proposed calling it Meeker, “a proposition that Mr. Meeker would not listen to.” After that, Boyd writes, “It was then unanimously agreed to name it Greeley.” By April 1870, a Colorado paper could report that “The town has been named Greeley.”

The founder who wasn’t

Boyd spends a good part of his first chapter setting the record straight. The town bears the name of the Tribune’s founder, he admits, and that “quite naturally misleads” people into thinking Horace Greeley founded it. In Boyd’s account, Greeley was “only an endorser, and friend, and valuable helper of the scheme, but in no sense its originator.”

What got under his skin was a circular from Greeley’s own Board of Trade in 1886. It opened with the line, “Greeley was founded in 1870 by Horace Greeley, in whose honor it is named.” Boyd quotes it so you can see exactly what he was arguing against. The mix-up goes back to the start. That April 1870 newspaper story calls it “what is commonly known as the ‘Meeker Colony,’” but a few lines later it says, “if we are not mistaken,” that the idea was “a pet one of Horace Greeley’s.”

When Greeley came to Greeley

The man himself did show up. Boyd says Horace Greeley was supposed to give the Fourth of July speech in 1870, but his health kept him away. He arrived on October 12, was met at the depot by nearly the whole town, and spoke from a hastily built stand in front of The Greeley Tribune building. Boyd says he found the place “all town and no country,” which he didn’t like, and talked to the crowd about irrigation and farming.

If you’re keeping score, Henry Gannett’s 1905 place-names list for the U.S. Geological Survey simply says the city is named for Horace Greeley. That part was never in doubt. And Meeker didn’t stay off the map forever. Boyd points out that another Colorado town was later named Meeker because it’s near the White River Indian Agency, the scene of what he calls the “Meeker massacre.” To Boyd, that was “a less sufficient reason” than naming this town for him would have been.

Sources & further reading

• David Boyd, A History: Greeley and the Union Colony of Colorado (1890). The locating committee, the Meeker proposal and Meeker’s refusal, Greeley as “endorser” rather than founder, the 1886 Board of Trade circular and the opening line of Meeker’s call (pp. 11–12, 32); Meeker as the Tribune’s agricultural editor (p. 16); West’s account of the naming and the later town of Meeker (p. 44); Horace Greeley’s visit (pp. 82–83).
• James F. Willard, ed., The Union Colony at Greeley, Colorado, 1869–1871 (1918), pp. 240–241. Reprints an April 9, 1870, story from the Daily Colorado Tribune: the officers of the colony, “The town has been named Greeley,” the “Meeker Colony,” and the idea as “a pet one of Horace Greeley’s.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 143. Greeley, Weld County, “named for Horace Greeley.”