(W. R.)
GREELEY, a city and the county-seat of Weld county, Colorado, U.S.A., about 50 m. N. by E. of Denver. Pop. (1890) 2395; (1900) 3023 (286 foreign-born); (1910) 8179. It is served by the Union Pacific and the Colorado & Southern railways. In 1908 a franchise was granted to the Denver & Greeley Electric railway. The city is the seat of the State Normal School of Colorado (1889). There are rich coal-fields near the city. The county is naturally arid and unproductive, and its agricultural importance is due to an elaborate system of irrigation. In 1899 Weld county had under irrigation 226,613 acres, representing an increase of 102.2% since 1889, and a much larger irrigated area than in any other county of the state. Irrigation ditches are supplied with water chiefly from the Cache la Poudre, Big Thompson and South Platte rivers, near the foothills. The principal crops are potatoes, sugar beets, onions, cabbages and peas; in 1899 Weld county raised 2,821,285 bushels of potatoes on 23,195 acres (53% of the potato acreage for the entire state). The manufacture of beet sugar is a growing industry, a large factory having been established at Greeley in 1902. Beets are also grown as food for live stock, especially sheep. Peas, tomatoes, cabbages and onions are canned here. Greeley was founded in 1870 by Nathan Cook Meeker (1817-1879), agricultural editor of the New York Tribune. With the support of Horace Greeley (in whose honour the town was named), he began in 1869 to advocate in The Tribune the founding of an agricultural colony in Colorado. Subsequently President Hayes appointed him Indian agent at White River, Colorado, and he was killed at what is now Meeker, Colorado, in an uprising of the Ute Indians. Under Meeker’s scheme, which attracted mainly people from New England and New York state, most of whom were able to contribute at least a little capital, the Union Colony of Colorado was organized and chartered, and bought originally 11,000 acres of land, each member being entitled to buy from it one residence lot, one business lot, and a tract of farm land. The funds thus acquired were, to a large extent, expended in making public improvements. A clause inserted in all deeds forbade the sale of intoxicating liquors on the land concerned, under pain of the reversion of such property to the colony. The initiation fees ($5) were used for the expenses of locating the colony, and the membership certificate fees ($150) were expended in the construction of irrigating ditches, as was the money received from the sale of town lots, except about $13,000 invested in a school building (now the Meeker Building). Greeley was organized as a town in 1871, and was chartered as a city of the second class in 1886. The “Union Colony of Colorado” still exists as an incorporated body and holds reversionary rights in streets, alleys and public grounds, and in all places “where intoxicating liquors are manufactured, sold or given away, as a beverage.”
See Richard T. Ely, “A Study of a ‘Decreed’ Town,” Harper’s Magazine, vol. 106 (1902-1903), p. 390 sqq.
GREEN, ALEXANDER HENRY (1832-1896), English geologist, son of the Rev. Thomas Sheldon Green, master of the Ashby Grammar School, was born at Maidstone on the 10th of October 1832. He was educated partly at his father’s school, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and afterwards at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated as sixth wrangler in 1855 and was elected a fellow of his college. In 1861 he joined the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and surveyed large areas of the midland counties, Derbyshire and Yorkshire. He wrote (wholly or in part) memoirs on the Geology of Banbury (1864), of Stockport (1866), of North Derbyshire (1869, 2nd ed. 1887), and of the Yorkshire Coal-field (1878). In 1874 he retired from the Geological Survey, having been appointed professor of geology in the Yorkshire College at Leeds; in 1885 he became also professor of mathematics, while for many years he held the lectureship on geology at the school of military engineering at Chatham. He was elected F.R.S. in 1886, and two years later was chosen professor of geology in the university of Oxford. His manual of Physical Geology (1876, 3rd ed. 1882) is an excellent book. He died at Boar’s Hill, Oxford, on the 19th of August 1896.
A portrait of him, with brief memoir, was published in Proc. Yorksh. Geol. and Polytechnic Soc. xiii. 232.
GREEN, DUFF (1791-1875), American politician and journalist, was born in Woodford county, Kentucky, on the 15th of August 1791. He was a school teacher in his native state, served during the War of 1812 in the Kentucky militia, and then settled in Missouri, where he worked as a schoolmaster and practised law. He was a member of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1820, and was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1820 and to the state Senate in 1822, serving one term in each house. Becoming interested in journalism, he purchased and for two years edited the St Louis Enquirer. In 1825 he bought and afterwards edited in Washington, D.C., The United States Telegraph, which soon became the principal organ of the Jackson men in opposition to the Adams administration. Upon Andrew Jackson’s election to the presidency, the Telegraph became the principal mouthpiece of the administration, and received printing patronage estimated in value at $50,000 a year, while Green became one of the coterie of unofficial advisers of Jackson known as the “Kitchen Cabinet.” In the quarrel between Jackson and John C. Calhoun, Green supported the latter, and through the columns of the Telegraph violently attacked the administration. In consequence, his paper was deprived of the government printing in the spring of 1831. Green, however, continued to edit it in the Calhoun interest until 1835, and gave vigorous support to that leader’s nullification views. From 1835 to 1838 he edited The Reformation, a radically partisan publication, devoted to free trade and the extreme states’ rights theory. In 1841-1843 he was in Europe on behalf of the Tyler administration, and he is said to have been instrumental in causing the appointment of Lord Ashburton to negotiate in Washington concerning the boundary dispute between Maine and Canada. In January 1843 Green established in New York City a short-lived journal, The Republic, to combat the spoils system and to advocate free trade. In September 1844 Calhoun, then secretary of state, sent Green to Texas ostensibly as consul at Galveston, but actually, it appears, to report to the administration, then considering the question of the annexation of Texas, concerning the political situation in Texas and Mexico. After the close of the war with Mexico Green was sent to that country in 1849 by President Taylor to negotiate concerning the moneys which, by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States had agreed to pay; and he saved his country a considerable sum by arranging for payment in exchange instead of in specie. Subsequently Green was engaged in railway building in Georgia and Alabama. On the 10th of June 1875 he died in Dalton, Georgia, a city which in 1848 he had helped to found.