In the 1930s, farmers in the eastern plains of Colorado were grappling with something familiar to modern residents of the state: severe drought. Severe drought and poor farming techniques led to severe dust storms and wiped out the arability of the farmland that thousands of Colorado families were living on.
To assist these families, former President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the Resettlement Administration as part of the broader New Deal. One of the regional headquarters for the program was based in Denver, headed by J.H. Jenkins, a former Denver and Pueblo resident, according to a Rocky Mountain News article of the time.
The plan for the administration was broad at the outset, with goals to resettle families, initiate and administer soil erosion and flood control programs and make loans to help farmers. The Denver headquarters was given the remit of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.
Southeastern Colorado was a particular focus of Jenkins.It was an area hard-hit by the dust bowl. According to a Rocky Mountain News article, Jenkins’ plans included removing a large part of that Dust Bowl from competitive agriculture and returning the land to restricted grazing land.
To assist with the various land-related efforts of the administration, attorneys were needed across the three states. In Colorado, at least three attorneys were tasked with tracing and clearing titles to land that the agency approved for purchase. The attorneys had a lot of acreage to trace, according to the Rocky Mountain News. Across the region, titles needed to be traced for more than 1.1 million acres.
Near the end of 1935, more jobs had been given out in Colorado, largely near the front range. By January 1936, almost 12,000 farmers had received emergency loans totaling more than $3.5 million. More than 7,000 of those farmers were from Colorado, with an average amount of $600. But the Rocky Mountain News noted that “the strengthening effect on clients, judging from scores of letters, could not be measured in dollars and cents.”
By June 1936, the first resettlement projects in Colorado were approved. According to the Rocky Mountain News, hundreds of farmers from the eastern plains were set to be moved to farms on the Western Slope, specifically near Grand Junction and in the Uncompahgre Valley.
Work was also well underway across the state as the administration worked on three projects that aimed to combat soil erosion. At Fountain Creek, workers constructed 400 check dams and planted 634,000 trees in an attempt to halt the erosion of watersheds. In southern Otero County, workers planted 18,000 trees to hold moisture. Farther north in Weld County, workers terraced 7,000 acres for the same purpose. According to the Rocky Mountain News, the projects were experiments to try and solve the dust problem.
The tally of farmers who received aid from the program totaled more than 28,000 farmers in Colorado by January 1937, but the federal government was also working to protect the land for the future. According to the Rocky Mountain News, the administration placed insurance on vast land areas to guarantee proper usage of the land.
But there was also some frustration over the land purchases of the administration. Colorado county assessors and state tax commission assessors asked Congress for reimbursement of the lost taxes from the land that the administration had taken over.
A lawyer practicing out of Colorado Springs was also frustrated with the administration, and he testified in front of Congress in 1937, alleging that the government had not paid him as agreed. He said that the payment failure came after he refused to buy books from a representative of the Democratic National Committee.
By 1938, the resettlement administration was finished. The organization was rolled into the Farm Security Administration, but in the few years of its existence, farmers had been moved from the eastern plains to areas near Montrose, Delta, Grand Junction, the Uncompahgre Valley and the San Luis Valley.