Greeley is the house rule municipality city that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Weld County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,795 at the 2020 United States Census, an accrual of 17.12% since the 2010 United States Census. Greeley is the tenth most populous city in Colorado. Greeley is the principal city of the Greeley, CO Metropolitan Statistical Area and is a major city of the Front Range Urban Corridor. Greeley is located in northern Colorado and is situated 49 miles (79 km) north-northeast of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver.

Greeley began as the Union Colony of Colorado, which was founded in 1869 by Nathan C. Meeker, an agricultural reporter for the New York Tribune as an experimental utopian farming community “based on temperance, religion, agriculture, education and relatives values,” with the support of the Tribune‘s editor Horace Greeley, who popularized the phrase “Go West, young man”. A committee which included Meeker and former Civil War general Robert Alexander Cameron traveled to Colorado to locate a standard site, and purchased 12,000 acres at the confluence of the Cache la Poudre and South Platte Rivers. The site, formerly known as the “Island Grove Ranch”, included the area of Latham, an Overland Trail station, and was halfway amongst Cheyenne, Wyoming and Denver, Colorado along the tracks of the Denver Pacific Railroad.

By May, 500 people had arrived to take up domicile in the extra colony. The reveal Union Colony was far along changed to Greeley in rave review of Horace Greeley, who had enter upon Colorado in the 1859 Pike’s Peak Gold Rush.

Greeley is located just west of the area previously occupied by the Overland Trail station of Latham, originally called the Cherokee City Station. The Latham station, which was assumed name Fort Latham, was built in 1862 and named in tribute of Milton S. Latham, one of California’s at the forefront senators. The stagecoach station was at the confluence of the South Platte River and the Cache la Poudre River. It is believed that the birth of the first white child born in Colorado, a girl, occurred there. Fort Latham was the headquarters of the presidency troops during the Indian conflicts of 1860–1864 and the county seat; the herald office was called Latham.