Monday, October 3
Utopia, Colorado
So all my novels are set in a legendary, mythical place called Utopia, Colorado. It's a small but booming residential town about 20 minutes south of where I live. It was founded, in fact, in the early 1870s by refugees of a sort from my hometown, Greeley, Colo. Greeley itself was founded as a sort of modern utopian society by a band of religious, clean-living temperance-loving New Yorkers and their pals and families. They came west in the late 1860s as the Union Colony with the support of New York newspaperman and one-time presidential candidate Horace Greeley.
They set up their model town near the confluence of the South Platte and Cache La Poudre Rivers. Well, among the Union Colonists were a group of about 20 or so progressive religious families with ties to the Boston area. Once here, they became somewhat unsatisfied with the fundamentalist fervor and direction of the town of Greeley, and, thinking they could do it better themselves, they moved south along the South Platte River and started their own town, which they named Utopia after their high-minded ideals. This was two years before Colorado achieved statehood as the Centennial state in 1876.
Utopia was a small, dusty, depressed farm town for a long time, not nearly as prosperous as some of the neighboring towns and villages like Greeley and Longmont and Brighton and Denver, primarily because a vocal minority refused to put the town on the east side of the river, which is where the railroad from Denver to Cheyenne was located. Instead, they vetoed every attempt to do so and eventually bargained the compromise that put the town on the west side of the river, which in addition to being away from the railroad was also prone to minor flooding during high run-off years.
Still, the town hung on through the many typical Colorado booms and busts through the years until it was discovered first, in the early 1970s, as a very affordable haven for the poorer hippies and beatsters who couldn't afford to live in the foothills around Boulder, and then in the 1990s when commuters discovered the charm, access and low cost of living there. It's been a boomtown every since and is now crammed to the curbs with planned residential communities and two-story, 2200 square foot homes.
It's also been the home town or current residence of key people in all of my novels so far, and it will be the residence of my next main character (who I explained to you in some detail in the 'lost' post below).
more later.
