High Plains Horticulture: A History

3: Horticulture for Home and Community

33 p A mong the very first purchases for the Union Colony of Colorado, ordered by its founder, Nathan C. Meeker (1817–1879), in April 1870, was a railroad car full of shade and fruit trees from the Bloomington Nurseries. Since irrigation water was not yet available at the Greeley town site, the trees were temporarily heeled into trenches, with roots well covered, close to the Cache la Poudre River. It was not until June 1871, when the first irrigation canal brought water into town, that the trees could be planted permanently. Because the early growing season had passed and there was not enough time for solid rooting before the advent of cold weather, all the fruit trees and most of the shade trees were dead by the following spring. Meeker readily acknowledged, four years later in his Greeley Tribune, that when he and the other colonists first located in Colorado Territory, “we had no kind of idea of the difficulties attending the culture of many kinds of vegetables. The great variety of forest trees which grow in the states without any trouble, many of them as spontaneously as weeds, can here scarcely be made to live when 3 Horticulture for Home and Community 34 Horticulture for Home and Community brought hither with the greatest care and cultivated with the utmost attention.” And yet by 1890, Captain David Boyd, among the first Union colonists, described Greeley, population 2,500, as a community of homes surrounded by fine evergreens , deciduous shade trees, and lawns.1 Nevertheless, this was not precisely the community Meeker had planned; nor had horticulture developed quite as he had envisioned. Meeker’s idealism, even if brass-bound, presaged some present-day notions for using horticulture as a means of creating a sense of place. The steps in his career that took Meeker to Greeley illustrate the intertwining of the practice of cultivating the soil strictly speaking and the more generally civilizing aspect of horticulture in the settlement of the High Plains. It is not too much to say that the High Plains owe much to the example of Meeker and his fellow colonists, in the sense that they helped provide “an impulse” to the development of horticulture as an expression of civic-mindedness.2 In 1834, at age seventeen, Meeker left the family farm at Euclid, Ohio, to seek his literary fortune in New York City. After eight years without achieving success, he took a teaching job in Long Hill, New Jersey. Continued meager earnings may have been the immediate cause of his attraction to the ideas of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, which Meeker found described in a periodic column of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. After less than a year of teaching, Meeker returned to Ohio where he began to write and lecture on Fourier. Like many utopians before and since, Fourier was quixotic: idealistic and a bit odd. He had adopted the notion that social harmony could best be achieved through the establishment of small cooperative communities. Each individual entering such a community, known as a phalanx or phalanstery, would obtain landed property, thereby securing a stake in the community and becoming an equal with other property holders. As individuals cooperated and competition disappeared, harmony and happiness would result, all, of course, based on the assumption of the ultimate goodness of human nature. While the first Fourier community had been established near Paris in 1832, the movement enjoyed its greatest popularity in the United States during the 1840s, when sixteen communities were founded—most notably Brook Farm near Roxbury, Massachusetts. Less well-known was Trumbull Phalanx at Braceville, near Warren, Ohio, of which Meeker was a founding member and the corresponding secretary. Trumbull started with a few primitive log buildings on a 275acre plot and not as the community “palace” Fourier had envisioned or Meeker had expected. The phalanx did, however, come close to self-sufficiency in grow- Horticulture for Home and Community 35 ing its own food—a menu based on whole wheat flour and abstinence from alcoholic drinks. Meeker and his young family resided at Trumbull from 1844 until 1847 when a malarial fever, the ague, caused the phalanx’s gradual debilitation and dissolution.3 Again close to destitute, Meeker joined his family’s general merchandise business in Euclid for two years before accepting an invitation to open a general store in Hiram, Ohio, where the Campbellites, an...