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Dearfield gets second chance at life

By Mary Voelz Chandler, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 4, 2008 at 7:18 p.m.

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A table still stands in the lunchroom at the former site of a black farming community.

Photo by Ellen Jaskol © The Rocky

A table still stands in the lunchroom at the former site of a black farming community.

An advertisement on a poster from the Greeley Museums Collection touts Dearfield.

Photo by The City Of Greeley Museums Collection

An advertisement on a poster from the Greeley Museums Collection touts Dearfield.

LaWanna Larson, director of the Black American West Museum, stands on the porch of O.T. Jackson's home in Dearfield, a onetime black farming settlement east of Greeley that the museum hopes to preserve as an interpretive center.

Photo by Ellen Jaskol © The Rocky

LaWanna Larson, director of the Black American West Museum, stands on the porch of O.T. Jackson's home in Dearfield, a onetime black farming settlement east of Greeley that the museum hopes to preserve as an interpretive center.

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DEARFIELD — When most people zip along U.S. 34 about 25 miles east of Greeley, the little Dearfield sign is a mere green blip, the three grayed wooden structures mere ruins, the scrub land mere dirt that could not possibly support life.

But when LaWanna Larson stands near the sunflowers and the blooming cactus, looking down a dirt road at empty buildings, she sees something different, something that stretches back almost a century in time.

"I get this overwhelming sense of hope," says Larson, for four years executive director of the Black American West Museum.

"This open land and the possibilities of owning it and being able to grow your own food and build your own home and have your own schools. To have your own churches and get away, back then, from the oppression that was going on in the cities, and getting back to the earth."

"Back then" was 1910, when O.T. Jackson and others decided to follow a national trend and begin a black colony: Dearfield. Jackson's claim on 320 acres sealed the deal and launched the town, one of about 15 black settlements in Colorado and among dozens across the United States where the currency was counted out in wishes.

"The new settlers at Dearfield were as poor as people could be when they took up their homesteads," Jackson told a writer in 1915 for the publication Western Farm Life.

"Some who filed on their claims did not have money enough to ship their household goods or pay their railroad fare. Some of them paid their fare as far as they could and then walked the balance of the way to Dearfield."

They ate potatoes one early winter, slept in caves dug into the hills; but even with dry-land farming, they began producing bountiful crops.

It was a time of change for the country's black citizens, battered by the end of Reconstruction and the diminution of rights in the South.

Booker T. Washington was urging people to return to the land. W.E.B. DuBois was telling them to get an education. Some people, Larson notes, did both. The settlers of Dearfield heard Washington's call, and named the town's main street after him.

Now, Dearfield is approaching 100, and though long empty - the nail basically closed the coffin when O.T. Jackson died in 1948 - the town has friends who want to help preserve the buildings and turn this windswept place into an interpretive center.

First is the Museum, which has owned some land in Dearfield for years, but received 19 more parcels last fall, literally out of the blue.

Then there is Weld County, where County Commissioner William Garcia has taken an interest in Dearfield and asked staffers to meet with museum officials and others to discuss the future of a settlement nearing its centennial.

The museum has a staff of one (Larson), a band of dedicated volunteers, an annual budget of about $80,000, and perhaps $5 in its Dearfield fund. The trim historic home on California Street is 90-some miles and a world away from Dearfield.

Over the years, numerous studies have piled up on Dearfield: a 1994 survey of homesteading and town development, a 1998 strategic plan for the townsite, a 2003 land-acquisition study, a 2003 plan for an archaeological site and interpretive center.

Research, research and more research, with the goal of the museum getting more land. The state gave money to stabilize the O.T. Jackson home, which the museum owns. Colorado Preservation Inc. put Dearfield on its list of Most Endangered Places and still works with the museum on preservation issues.

But then the alarm went off.

Last fall, Larson was preparing to weed the museum lawn when the phone rang. It was a developer named Hank Bailey, who was ready to shed 19 Dearfield parcels.

"He said, 'I hear you people want Dearfield,' " says Larson. "And I thought, yes, yes we do, and I was about to say but we don't have any money, and he goes, 'If you want Dearfield I suggest you get down here now. I have about 19 city blocks, me and my partner, and we want to give it to the museum and be done with it now, NOW.' . . . We got down there, and (he) met me at the door, threw all this paperwork at me and said, 'You can have it but you need to find an attorney.' "

Now the museum must do more. It must reach out to others who own land there to plan the future. (The lunchroom is owned by a Mead resident who acquired the land by paying back-taxes.) It must form a Dearfield board to report to the museum board, a move decided during one of the meetings convened by Weld County. And it must find money, first to pay for a historic monument at Dearfield.

"I wanted to bring people together," Weld County Commissioner Garcia says. "We have done what we could do. (LaWanna's) been given a town, a town more than an hour away. How do you manage that? With a board that synthesizes some of the current board and Greeley-area folks and the university and museums, our hope is that it will start off fresh."

And what will the museum do? "That's a very good question," said board co-chairwoman Moya Hansen, a curator at the Colorado Historical Society. "Plans for Dearfield by the last board have not been brought forward. There have been other pressing things. It takes my breath away."

For Larson, it's one step away from a miracle.

"He just handed us our dream, just handed it to us," Larson says of the Bailey gift as she stands near the porch of the O.T. Jackson home.

"I sat down and thought . . . The really special thing about this is that we lost this community 60 years ago (when Jackson died). . . . Here we are standing here, and the dream's come back to life.

"How often do things like that come to happen? How often do you lose a dream like that, and it comes back and it's back in the community's hands, those dreams? I just wanted to weep."

Dearfield legacy

Work is beginning to build public interest in preserving Dearfield. That includes raising funds to erect a monument with historical information near the structures on U.S. 34, along with these activities:

* Aug. 16: clean-up day at Dearfield and meeting on plans. Information: Black American West Museum, 303-482-2242.

* Aug. 23: Performances, beginning at 10 a.m., in Linn Grove Cemetery, Greeley: "Spirits of Greeley" program, where the Silent City Theatre Troupe brings to life notables from the city's past. This year personages include Dearfield founder O.T. Jackson. Fee charged. Information: 970-350-9220, or greeleymuseums.com.

* Sept. 28: A community celebration at Dearfield, with festival and recognition of the Black American West Museum's acquisition of more land there. Information: 303-482-2242.

* Dearfield DVD: Learn more in the 1995 documentary Dearfield: The Road Less Traveled, created by actor and producer donnie l. betts and former TV anchorwoman Reynelda Ware Muse. $19.95; musicis mylife.info or nocredits.com

* Black American West Museum, 3091 California St.; open Tuesday through Saturday; 303-482-2242; blackamericanwestmuseum.com

Dearfield in context

* Early 1870s: First attempts by blacks to found colonies in Colorado.

* 1910: Colorado Negro Business League member O.T. Jackson files on 320 acres in Weld County as a desert claim (later a homestead), founding Dearfield as a place for blacks to chart their own future.

* 1911: Jackson builds a house there; that year Dearfield (so named, it is said, because the "land was so dear" to its settlers); is home to seven families and two houses; some couldn't afford to build a wooden house, so instead they stayed in tents, dugouts or caves in the hillside.

* 1915: Dearfield is home to 27 families and 44 buildings, according to research by the Greeley Museum.

* 1910-1917: The value of Dearfield's holdings grows from $25,000, or $1.25 per acre, to $432,500, or $15 per acre, according to research by University of Northern Colorado professor George Junne.

* 1917: Settlers harvest the first marketable crops.

* 1918: Dearfield gets its own post office, and consists of 16 unplatted blocks, totaling 250 acres.

* 1920: Dearfield is peaking, with a population "just short of 700 persons who worshipped on Sunday in two churches. The hotel, restaurant, school and other amenities signaled the residents' devotion to building a functional community. There were even plans to build a canning factory," according to Junne.

* 1921: Land in Dearfield is valued at more than $750,000, livestock more than $200,000 and annual production of nearly $125,000, Junne writes.

* Mid 1920s: The bottom falls out of the booming market for Dearfield's crops. To boost production, farmers around the country - including in Dearfield - had mortgaged land and bought new machinery. They are in debt. Founder Jackson seeks buyers for lots within town.

* 1930s: The Depression and Dust Bowl drought cause more people to leave.

* 1946: The final year Jackson runs the gas station. His niece continues to live in Dearfield (apparently the only resident) into the 1950s. Others operate the gas station/store into the 1990s.

* 1948: O.T. Jackson dies Feb. 18 at age 86, at the Weld County Hospital in Greeley. The town already is essentially empty.

* 1999: Colorado Preservation Inc. lists Dearfield on its Most Endangered Places List.

* 2000: The Colorado General Assembly appropriates $250,000 to stabilize O.T. Jackson's house, which is owned by the Black American West Museum.

* Fall 2007: Developer Hank Bailey offers 19 more parcels to the museum.

* February 2008: Weld County officials, historians, preservationists and the Black American West Museum begin meeting to consider the future of Dearfield.

Comments

  • July 5, 2008

    8:35 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    arby writes:

    Ms Larson,
    I hope you can pull this off. Do you imagine people living in Dearfield again? I've been to your museum. Great job. I've not been to Dearfield.

    I'm a white guy who used to cowboy a little bit. So I could really appreciate the memorabilia. The staff was a little nervous with me being there but were gracious. It was a late morning in the middle of the week so I was the only looker. When I told them I just liked western stuff they were OK. (I wasn't dressed right for a cowboy. I had business to do.)

    It's a great museum and I recommend everyone visit and put a fiver or more in the jar.

  • July 6, 2008

    9:24 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    Brownbear writes:

    Ms. Larson,
    Congratulations!! I've never heard of Dearfield until now, and I regret, I have not visited the Black American West Museum yet. I moved to Colorado 17 years ago from Los Angeles, and it's almost sad to not read more about Colorado's black settlers and colonies. When is white Colorado (no offense, arby) going to acknowledge the Blacks that settled in and currently live in Colorado??

    I'm a multiracial man who has made it a point to acknowledge my heritages every chance I can get, especially living in Colorado, which used to be a meeting place for many KKK rallies in the 1930's. Maybe someday, the conservative population of Colorado will realize that the world IS changing, and that we need to progress with it.

    Ms. Larson, you have my support, and anyone else reading this, I urge to you to support the Dearfield fund, and Colorado Black History as well.