Las Colonias, Grand Junction, Colorado 1930 Grand Junction Mesa Colorado 81501 USA An area along the northern bank of the Colorado River corresponding roughly to the southern edge of Grand Junction’s downtown. At one time, the Old Spanish Trail passed through the area. In their short history of the Las Colonias area, Johnathan Carr and Claire Kempa hypothesize that this stretch of the area was used even earlier by the Tabeguache Utes as a wintering spot. In 1899, it became a center of local agriculture with the construction of the Colorado Sugar Manufacturing Company factory. The factory stood between 9th and 12th Streets, on land donated by the city of Grand Junction. It relied on locally grown beets for its production. It also sold waste from sugar beet production to local farmers as animal feed, and the land around the factory was used for feed lots. It closed in 1933 when then owner Holly Sugar relocated its production facilities to Delta, Colorado. The area near the factory got its name from long houses the Holly Sugar Company built for Mexican workers who had come to Grand Junction to work in the sugar plant. According to oral history interviewee Dorothy Tindall, Holly Sugar constructed an apartment block of twenty-two room units around 1930. These buildings housed migrant workers and their families. The workers were primarily from Mexico and Colorado’s San Luis Valley, and came to harvest sugar beets. Dwain T. Jackson, who worked with residents of the area as an employee of the Mesa County Department of Public Welfare in the late 1940's, recalls many of the residents having come from Taos. While Tindall remembers the adobe buildings being located at the intersection of Struther’s Avenue and 12th Street, the City of Grand Junction’s Las Colonias history references the construction of two long buildings just west of the sugar beet factory in the early 1920’s. Because the work shifted seasonally between the farms and the factory, the apartments were generally only lived in between November and April. The use of these apartments was considered part of the compensation to the workers for their labors. This housing for the primarily Mexican workers got the name La Colonia, and was the basis for the Las Colonias name still held by the surrounding neighborhood and riverfront land today. When Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans began moving to the area for work during World War I, the area had a primarily Anglo population, with a smattering of Italians, Germans and Greeks. The Climax Uranium Company bought the old sugar mill and surrounding acreage in 1950. Though an economic boon to the county, the uranium operation spread mill tailings along the river, creating lasting and hazardous pollution in the area that it took a Federal Superfund project to cleanup in the 1990’s. A uranium mill tailings pile that existed near the river was also utilized by contractors and homeowners as fill dirt and as an ingredient in cement (because it mimicked sand), thereby spreading radioactive placing radioactive mill tailings in and around dwellings and buildings throughout the Grand Valley. Today, people continue to live in neighborhoods near the river, and several commercial enterprises are also located in the area. The actual riverfront acreage encompasses Las Colonias Park, Edgewater Brewery, a Frisbee golf course, and will soon be home to a business park. *Some of the information in this history was taken from The History of Las Colonias Park: Historic Crossroads Along the Riverfront Of Grand Junction, Colorado by Jonathan Carr and Claire Kempa. yes yes La Colonia