By Ruthanne Johnson
For more than 30 years, efforts to save the town of Dearfield – one of Colorado’s most significant African American landmarks – have spawned little more than intermittent flurries of attention. Soon, the historic site 25 miles east of Greeley on Highway 34 may get the attention it so desperately needs.
Weld County, the Black American West Museum and Colorado Preservation have teamed up to promote something called heritage tourism, a way of generating income through drawing tourists to places of historical and cultural value. For Dearfield, the growing trend among adventure-seeking, history-loving travelers may have arrived just in the nick of time.
Slated to celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2010, the once-thriving, all-Black farming community of Dearfield was founded by Oliver Tousaint Jackson on May 10, 1910. A son of former slaves, Jackson was profoundly influenced by Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, a book strongly advocating the advancement of Blacks in America through education and land ownership. The town thrived until the Great Depression hit in 1929, followed by the Dust Bowl through the 1930s.
“Own the ground, own the ground,” often counseled one of Dearfield’s earliest residents, Hattie Rothwell, to her young son Charles. For African Americans struggling to emerge from under the repressive fist of white domination, owning and farming the land meant freedom through self-sustenance. Living among their own also meant a reprieve from the steady barrage of discrimination.
“Having their own community freed them in many ways,” said University of Northern Colorado Africana Studies Professor George Junne, who became interested in Dearfield’s unique history in the early 1990s. “Some communities back then were called sundown towns, because if you were Black you had to be out by sundown. They even had signs that posted the warning.”
Although Dearfield’s first few years proved difficult due to a series of harsh winters and the settler’s inexperience at farming, life improved. For a while Jackson’s dream of a colony of “2,000 good farmers by 1924” seemed to come to fruition. Its population reached 111 in 1915, with 40 farms of 160 acres each operating around the town center. When Jackson’s niece visited from Chicago in 1920, the town was bustling with nearly 300 residents. Dearfield boasted two churches, a school and a restaurant. Jackson had ambitions of building a canning factory, soap factory, 50-room hotel, and even a college based on the Tuskegee principles. But trouble loomed on the horizon.
Located several miles south of the South Platte River, Dearfield depended on wells and a disappearing stream, running through the property, for water. The townspeople lacked the funds to buy water rights from the nearby Empire Ditch Company, and when drought hit the West in the early 1930s, the dream of Dearfield withered away in the dry winds. Even their underground stream was choked dry.
Had it not been for the Dust Bowl, Dearfield may have survived the Great Depression, but the colony did not have enough capital to see them through the hard times. Most Dearfield residents sold out for as little as $5 a house.
In 1940, a census showed 12 remaining residents, including an aging Jackson. In 1944, his niece returned to tend to his frail health, but to a vastly different scene than when she had originally visited in the town’s heyday. The once busy streets were now deserted, and the prairie had already begun to reclaim the land.
“Dearfield was one of only 15 all-Black communities in Colorado at the time, including Manzonolo and others near Cañon City, Akron, Craig, and Cortez,” said Professor Junne.
Of these, however, Dearfield was the most enduring and is to date the only one with buildings still intact.
“The others towns were razed, but Dearfield still has legitimate traces of its history,” he said, explaining that the site is an important piece of Black history in the West.
Junne, who often takes students on field trips to Dearfield, said when he first began going to the site the roof was still covering a building called the Lunchroom, but the roof has since collapsed. He commented that something needs to be done before the few remaining structures fall beyond repair.
Settlement Decays As
Groups Seek Saving Grace
After Jackson’s death in 1948, much of his land was sold off to the highest bidder. Just 30 years later, all but one of the original property owners had retained their land. Dearfield was parceled out to a variety of buyers – most with no knowledge of the town’s history.
In 1984, the current owners of the filling station, Judy and Chet Clifton, contacted then Congressman Hank Brown about the town’s past. Brown enlisted the Colorado Historical Society and National Park Service to conduct a historic preservation survey on the abandoned site. Since then, the land has been used mostly for livestock grazing, and the structures have been repeatedly vandalized.
In 1995, a stabilization assessment by the U.S. Department of the Interior determined Dearfield worthy of registration with the National Register of Historic Places. Through a grant from the State Historic Fund in 1996, the Black American West Museum purchased 16 acres and Jackson’s deteriorating home, which was stabilized. Despite this progress, Dearfield was placed on “Colorado’s Most Endangered Places” list by the nonprofit Colorado Preservation in 1999.
“I grew up watching ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ which never depicted the Hispanic or Black experience – the colors of the West,” said LaWanna Larson, the executive director of the Black American West Museum in Denver. “It’s frightening to see the disintegration of this landmark in just 50 years, to see our history evaporating.”
Larson’s dream is to create a heritage trail, interpretive markers and possibly a working farm on the site.
“But right now, we’re focusing on acquisition and stabilization,” she said.
Preservation efforts were seriously thwarted in the late 1990s when private owners sold large tracts of land to developers such as Dearfield Properties, which wanted to promote modular home packages. Other challenges to preservation have included the difficulty of tracking down and negotiating with the numerous landowners within the 480 acres, the red tape involved in qualifying for official historic designation, and a trend in which historic Black sites are not funded as highly as other sites.
“This has been a challenging site, because it’s in a remote location and there are so many different owners and parcels of land,” said Sarah Hansen, a preservation coordinator with Colorado Preservation. “It has been a very slow process, dealing with the different property owners, but now we’re focusing on the filling station.”
According to Hansen, the filling station had to be stripped of all the non-historic elements to qualify for state preservation funding.
In an ironic twist of fate, Dearfield Properties donated 19 large parcels of land to the BAWM because the water rights were too expensive.
“It’s interesting that almost 100 years later, the land has been returned to the Black community due to water rights,” said Larson. “Usually once we loose our heritage, we don’t get it back.”
Weld County recently stepped into the picture to help in the effort to save Dearfield.
“There are lots of ethnicities represented in Weld County,” said County Commissioner Bill Garcia, “and funding is always a challenge. But we’d like to, at the minimum, see an interpretive sign of what Dearfield meant to its people.”
Representatives from the three entities – Black American West Museum, Weld County and Colorado Preservation – will be meeting in the upcoming months to consider Dearfield’s future and the town’s 100th anniversary celebration in 2010.
While discussions about the future of the historic settlement continue, however, what’s left of it continues to dwindle. Of the nearly 10 intact buildings at the site when the preservation efforts first began in 1984, only three main structures and a few out-buildings remain. Two historically significant structures that have collapsed due to the elements are the Lunchroom, a business in operation until 1939, and the Squire Brockman cabin, home of the town’s fiddle player and one of its last residents.
For more information on helping the preservation efforts through sponsorships or donations, call LaWanna Larson at 303-292-2566. The museum is looking for descendents of Dearfield settlers to share their stories, artifacts, photos, documents and other significant mementos of the settlement.
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