ABOUT GREELEY

Greeley is home to the University of Northern Colorado, JBS Meats, and a number of oil and gas companies, and has one of the lower average home prices and cost of living indexes in Colorado. Roughly 110,000 people call Greeley home. Named after the New York Tribune’s editor Horace Greeley who came to Colorado in 1859 in the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush and coined the phrase, ‘Go west, young man’, this agricultural-based city was originally planned as a utopia by Horace and a reporter named Nathan Meeker. Greeley began as the Union Colony, which was founded in 1869 as an experimental utopian community "based on temperance, religion, agriculture, education and family values." A vote to allow the sale of alcohol passed by a mere 477 votes in 1969, thus ending temperance in the city.

If you appreciate today’s automated sprinkler system watering your lawn and protecting homes and buildings, you have Henry Parmelee from Greeley to thank for that, who in 1874 further developed the first fire sprinklers brought over from the United Kingdom a decade earlier. Sugar beet production and processing was an enormous economy in northern Colorado in the past, and at one point, Greeley supplied a quarter of all the sugar sold and consumed in America. Greeley housed two POW camps in 1943, during World War II. One was for German POWs and the other was for Italian POWs. The Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra was started in 1911. In 1958, Greeley became the first city to have a Department of Culture.