Dearfield was a Black agricultural colony in Weld County

In 1910, Oliver Toussaint Jackson filed a desert claim on the high plains east of Greeley and set out to build an African American agricultural colony. The first settlers arrived the next year. They came for the thing a homestead promised and the rest of the country so often withheld: land of their own, and a living earned by their own work.

The early years were spare. Families started in tents, dugouts, and a handful of frame houses, then slowly built a town around them, with homes, churches, a school, a restaurant, and working farms. By 1920 Dearfield had grown into a real and thriving settlement. Then the ground that had made it possible turned against it. Drought, the Dust Bowl, and the broken economy of the 1930s took the momentum out of the colony and never gave it back.

It would be easy to file Dearfield away as a ghost town, but that misses what it carries. Its story runs through the heart of how Black homesteading, western opportunity, and the hard limits of dryland farming all met on the Colorado plains. For many African Americans it remains a place of pride and persistence, and the documented history and preservation work are kept up through Weld County’s Dearfield page.