How does a homesteading reality show compare to actual life in 1872 Colorado Springs?

Courtesy Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum
A photograph of the site taken in 1871, showing three men standing in a vast open landscape with a few small buildings between them and the hills leading up to Pikes Peak. The area would become what is now Colorado Springs.


240124-historic-dearfield-black-homestead
Hart Van Denburg/CPR News
Dearfield, in Weld County between Kersey and Wiggins, was founded by Oliver Toussaint Jackson in 1910 as the largest Black homesteading site in Colorado. At its peak, Dearfield was home to about 300 people, but as with other parts of the High Plains, drought and the Dust Bowl years eventually drove them away. Now a ghost town, its on the National Register of Historic Places.

Dan Boyce/CPR News