Milestones Icon: Chicago-Colorado Colony

William Byers, owner of the Daily Rocky Mountain News, traveled to Illinois in 1870 on a recruiting mission. Byers wanted to repopulate the Colorado Territory after it suffered through the gold and silver bust in the late 1860s.

He pitched the territory’s other virtues: agriculture, new business opportunities, breathtaking scenery and an ideal climate to a group of prominent men in Chicago. Byers’ sales pitch worked; the Chicago-Colorado Colony was quickly founded, funded and a plan for a town was drawn up.

The only thing the Colony was missing was land on which to build its town. The Colony originally was invited to join the Union Colony in Greeley but declined. The pioneers traveled to Utah, met with Mormon leader Brigham Young, seeking opportunity there, but apparently were not impressed.

The Colony’s founders dispatched Seth Terry to find a suitable location. Terry scoured the Front Range before selecting a square mile on a bluff overlooking the town of Burlington in the area of Left Hand, Boulder, St. Vrain and Little Thomson creeks.

With the town planned and the site selected, 500 colonists purchased their parcels and headed west. They brought lumber and building materials to the barren site, where they built a small town by the summer of 1871 that became Longmont.

By June 1871, Longmont had a population of 400 with more people coming daily. It was later incorporated in 1873. It became a hub for farming activities such as sugar beets, alfalfa, beans, potatoes and peas were raised in the St. Vrain Valley.

Colony planners designed Longmont to look like many other towns in America. The original one-square-mile plan had stores along Main Street, homes arranged in a grid spreading out from Main Street, and industrial buildings located along the railroad and the St. Vrain River.

The Colony was one of the few successful colonization experiments (Greeley being the other notable one) in Colorado.

The success of the town was due to the organization and funding by the original members. Some of the major contributors never made it to Longmont, but their contributions enabled the settlers to embark on large-scale improvement such as irrigation projects and water systems, which could not be accomplished by individuals.

As the Colony was funded partly by land purchases, initial development, except in the central business district, was scattered throughout the town site. Many colonists bought more than one lot – some purchased entire blocks andbuilt their homes on one lot, and then began selling off the remaining parcels to new arrivals or family members. Many of the streets in Longmont are named after the colonists.

There is no specific area which can be identified as the Colony District. Even the downtown is not Colony as the 1879 fire destroyed most of the wood-frame business structures and had to be rebuilt.

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