Island Grove Park

AT A GLANCE ISLAND GROVE PARK WHAT: A public park and multi-faceted event center WHERE: Greeley, Colorado WEBSITE: www.greeleygov.com/activities/island-grove Island Grove Park IT’S VERY ACCOMMODATING W hen 19th century newspaperman Horace Greeley advised young men to “Go west,” Nathan Meeker, an American journalist and entrepreneur, who sometimes wrote for Greeley’s New York Tribune, took it to heart. “Meeker, who was from New York city, picked out this area to build a utopian community,” says Tom Welch, General Manager of Island Grove Park in Greeley, Colorado, a city of 105,000, some 50 miles north of Denver and 20 miles east of the Big Thompson Canyon, the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. Meeker, who was interested in communal living based upon Christianity and shared economic enterprise, and several hundred of his fellow settlers, organized what was known as the Union Colony on 2,000 acres at the confluence of the South Platte and Cache La Poudre Rivers on a Sioux Indian burial ground. The community was