Greeley, Colorado

Greeley didn't grow up the usual way. It was organized in 1869 by Nathan Meeker, an agricultural editor at Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, who pitched a cooperative farm colony in the pages of the paper and drew more than 3,000 responses. The Union Colony settled the Cache la Poudre valley in 1870 and named the town for his editor and backer. Members paid a fee, got farmland and a share of the irrigation, and signed on to high-minded rules: this was a temperance colony, and Greeley stayed legally dry until 1972. The town sits at about 4,665 feet on the Eastern Plains, the seat of Weld County, near where the Poudre meets the South Platte.

Because the prairie here is high and dry, the colony's first real work was water. The Number 3 Ditch began carrying water in June 1870, the first completed ditch in the new colony, and the canals that followed turned dryland into productive farm country. That irrigation pedigree runs straight into the modern city, and Greeley became a cattle town in the most literal sense. Warren Monfort grew a feedlot here starting in 1930, bought a Greeley slaughterhouse in 1960, and added processing a few years later, helping move beef packing out to where the cattle actually were. That plant, now run by JBS, is still one of the country's most important beef operations, accounting for roughly 7 percent of U.S. beef capacity and standing as Weld County's largest employer.