O.T. Jackson & Dearfield Colony
Weld County, Weld County, Colorado
Marker Inscription
COLORADO ENTREPRENEUR AND MESSENGER FOR THREE GOVERNORS, MR OT IOLIVER TOUSSAINTI JACKSON. FILED A DESERT CLAIM TO CREATE THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN ACRICULTURAL COLONY OF DEARFIELD IN MAY 1910 DR JOSEPH HP WESTBROOK MD OF DENUER PROCLAIMED AT AN ORGANIZATIONAL… transcription continues on the marker
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The Story
This marker honors O.T. Jackson, a Colorado entrepreneur and messenger to three governors, who filed a desert-land claim in 1910 to found Dearfield — one of the most ambitious African American agricultural colonies on the High Plains. Backed by boosters like Dr. Joseph H.P. Westbrook of Denver, Dearfield grew into a striving farming community of Black homesteaders before drought and the Depression emptied it into a ghost town.
Why it matters
Dearfield stands as a powerful symbol of Black self-determination and landownership in the West during the era of Jim Crow, when African Americans sought independence through the promise of the homestead.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The High Plains of eastern Colorado in 1910 were open, dry, and deceptively promising. This was the tail end of the great homesteading era, when federal land laws still dangled the possibility that a family with grit could file a claim, prove it up with a few years of labor, and walk away owning the ground beneath them. Desert-land claims like the one this marker records were part of that machinery, aimed at arid country that demanded irrigation and sweat.
For African Americans, that promise carried a special weight. This was the depths of the Jim Crow era, when segregation and disfranchisement were hardening across much of the country, and when Black families had good reason to look westward for something the settled towns denied them: land of their own, and the independence that came with it. The Progressive era's faith in uplift, self-help, and community-building ran strong in Black civic life, and a farm colony on the open plains fit that vision exactly.
Colorado, still a young state, was a place where a determined entrepreneur could imagine building something from nothing. Out here, far from the crowded city, the idea took hold that a community of Black homesteaders could plant not just crops but a whole way of life.
People & events
At the center stands O.T. Jackson — Oliver Toussaint Jackson — a Colorado entrepreneur who, the marker tells us, served as a messenger for three of the state's governors. That detail says a great deal: he was a man who moved in the corridors of state government, who knew how things worked, and who turned that knowledge outward toward a bold act of creation.
In May 1910 Jackson filed a desert-land claim and set about founding Dearfield, an African American agricultural colony. He did not do it alone. Boosters and believers lent their voices, among them Dr. Joseph H.P. Westbrook, a physician from Denver, whose involvement lent the venture the backing of the city's Black professional class. A doctor and a governors' messenger, joining hands to raise a farming town on the plains — it is a striking picture of ambition.
What grew from that claim was a striving community of Black homesteaders who broke the sod, planted, and built. For a time Dearfield lived up to its founders' hopes. But the same dry country that made a desert claim necessary in the first place proved unforgiving, and the drought and hard times that later swept the plains drained the colony away, until it stood as a ghost town — its houses emptied, its promise scattered.
Its place in the American story
Dearfield belongs to a story that runs far beyond Weld County: the long American drama of who gets to own land, and on what terms. In an era when African Americans were being pushed out of the vote and hemmed in by segregation, a Black-founded farm colony on the frontier was a quiet, powerful assertion — that self-determination and landownership were not privileges to be granted but goals to be seized.
It joins a scattering of Black homesteading settlements across the West, each a testament to the hunger for independence that drove families to gamble everything on distant, difficult ground. These communities are a crucial and too-little-known thread of both the westward-expansion story and African American history, proof that the frontier was settled by far more diverse hands than the old myths admit.
That Dearfield became a ghost town does not diminish it. The dream was real, the labor was real, and the courage it took to file that claim in 1910 speaks to a determination that outlasted the town itself.
If you visit
This is High Plains country — wide, wind-scoured, and quiet — and the emptiness is part of the meaning. What you'll find is less a bustling site than a place of absence, where you have to bring imagination to reconstruct the striving community that once worked these fields. Stand still and picture the sod broken, the crops in, the families at their labor.
Read the marker slowly and let the names settle: O.T. Jackson, Dr. Joseph H.P. Westbrook, the 1910 founding. These were real people making a real bet on this ground, and the monument exists to keep their ambition from vanishing entirely into the prairie wind.
If you're building a road trip through the West, let Dearfield be the stop that complicates the familiar frontier story — a reminder that the dream of a farm and a fresh start belonged to Black Americans too, and that they pursued it here against long odds. It's a place that rewards a thoughtful pause more than a quick photo.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · O.T. Jackson
- · Dr. Joseph H.P. Westbrook
Related events
- · Founding of Dearfield, 1910
Themes & tags
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