Battlement Mesa: The Company Town That Outlived Its Company

In the late nineteen seventies, Exxon had a vision: build an entire city from scratch on three thousand two hundred acres along the Colorado River to house twenty-five thousand workers and their families for its Colony oil shale project. Streets were graded, homes were built, amenities were installed, Battlement Mesa was designed as a full planned community, not a trailer camp.

Then on May second, nineteen eighty-two, the same day the nearby town of Parachute lost two thousand jobs, Exxon shut down the Colony project entirely. The half-finished town sat on the company's books.

Rather than demolish it, Exxon pivoted. The company marketed Battlement Mesa as a retirement community, and by the nineteen nineties it had found a second life. In nineteen ninety-seven, New Choices magazine named it one of the top twenty best retirement destinations in America. A city built for oil workers became a quiet retirement haven on the mesa above the Colorado River.