FOR RELEASE: Staff from the City of Greeley Museums will accept the 2015 Josephine H. Miles Award from History Colorado for its project, Prospective Colonists’ Letters to Nathan C. Meeker, Founder of Greeley, Colorado: Acquisition, Preservation, Exhibition, during a reception held this February.  The annual award is given to individuals, organizations or museums in the state that have made a major contribution during the year for the advancement of Colorado history.

According to Museum Programs Division Coordinator Megan Rose, “The competition was stiff but the committee felt that this [the letters] was an excellent history project because of the heavy community support and involvement as well as the national significance of these letters.”

The story of the prospective colonists’ letters, later named the Union Colony Letters, began in 1935 when 13-year old Jack Schuman found letters written to Nathan C. Meeker in the trash. Schuman died in 2002 followed by his wife in 2013 and their daughters inherited the letters which they offered to sell to the City of Greeley Museums.

In December 2013, the Greeley Museums partnered with the Friends of the Greeley Museums to acquire and preserve this collection of 320 letters written in response to Nathan Meeker’s article, “A Western Colony,” published on December 4, 1869 in the New York Tribune. Meeker, inspired by a visit to Colorado Territory in 1869, asked people to write to him if they wanted to join his proposed temperance and farming colony in the West. With 1,000 letters received in less than a month, a meeting was held to establish the Union Colony, a joint-stock colonization company that would plat the town of Greeley in April 1870.  After reviewing all letters, Meeker chose financially solvent, educated, religious, and hard-working individuals as colonists.

The Greeley Museums staff recognized the unique value of the collection. According to Museum Manager Dan Perry, “The letters contain biographical information, as well as economic, political and other insights that motivated people to seek a “fresh start” in Colorado Territory by becoming a member of Meeker’s colony.”

In less than two months, 82 generous individuals and organizations donated $24,500 to save and conserve the collection. A paper conservator worked in an “open lab” at the Greeley History Museum in the spring of 2014 so visitors could watch the conservation process. Seventeen new volunteers provided over 400 hours to transcribe the letters. Twenty letters were exhibited and rotated every four months, May 2014 through November 2015.

Now transcribed, catalogued, and digitized, the 1869 letters are housed in the Hazel E. Johnson Research Center at the Greeley History Museum.

A Greeley Tribune article about the letters was picked up by the Associated Press in December 2013 and appeared in 40+ newspapers around the country.

For more information about the Union Colony letters, call the Hazel E. Johnson Research Center in the Greeley History Museum at 970-336-4187.

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For more information, contact:
Dan Perry, Museums Manager
970-350-9218
[email protected]

Peggy Ford Waldo, Curator of Development
970-350-9217
[email protected]

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