Dearfield: Black Homesteaders on the Colorado Plains

Out here on the high plains northeast of Greeley, where the wind sweeps flat across the sage and the buildings have long since crumbled, stood one of the most remarkable communities in Colorado history. This is Dearfield, a town built by Black homesteaders who came to the plains to prove that land ownership meant freedom.

The man behind it was Oliver Toussaint Jackson. He was born in Oxford, Ohio, in eighteen sixty-two, the son of former slaves who named him after Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitian revolutionary who overthrew French colonial rule. Jackson grew up in Denver, became a successful caterer and businessman, and read Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up from Slavery. That book planted a seed. Washington argued that economic self-sufficiency and land ownership were the surest path to dignity for Black Americans, and Jackson decided to make that vision real on the Colorado plains.

In nineteen ten, Jackson filed his homestead claim on three hundred twenty acres in Weld County. He called the settlement Dearfield, because, he said, he wanted it to be dear to those who built it. Word spread through Denver's Black community. Families loaded wagons, built sod houses, and began turning the dry grassland into farms. They planted wheat, raised cattle, drilled irrigation wells, and opened a lunchroom, a gas station, and a schoolhouse. By the early nineteen twenties, as many as three hundred people had settled here, and the community's assessed land value had reached well over one million dollars.

Then the drought came, and then the Depression. Crop prices collapsed. Irrigation became unaffordable. By nineteen forty, only twelve people remained in Dearfield. Jackson himself stayed until nearly the end, tending the site he had built from nothing, living in the house he had constructed with his own hands. He died in nineteen forty-eight, outlasting his dream by just a few years.

Today what remains is a ruined gas station, the shell of a diner, and a weathered stone marker. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Colorado has proposed acquiring it for preservation. But standing here on the plains, you understand the scale of what Jackson attempted: out here, Black Coloradans built a city from dust, and kept it alive for two full decades before the forces of drought and economic collapse drove them away. The land endures. So does the story.