Anna M. Green

In 1870, Anna M. Green arrived in the Union Colony with her husband and other first settlers to farm ‘the Great American Desert’.  During her years here, she raised two children and supplemented her family’s income through baking, teaching and babysitting, but her greatest contribution to the arts legacy of Greeley is the book she wrote about her life in the colony.  The book is entitled “Sixteen Years on the Great American Desert; or the Trials of a Frontier Life.  The book documented the struggles of living in this land and her engaged interests in literary and thespian pursuits.  Most of the documented events listed in the book included unfortunate disasters in the early Union Colony: floods, tornadoes, deaths in the family and the ceremony for the late Nathan Meeker and his family who was killed in the Meeker Massacre on Colorado’s Western Slope in 1879. 

In addition, she added poems, songs, and various letters she had received, as well as conversations she had.  She also describes becoming a playwright and founded an amateur acting troupe, the Union Colony Victim Company to stage a play based on her writings.  Her memoir is a unique look into the lives of American women and farmers in the US West after the Civil War.  In addition to writing, she opened the colony’s first school.  After returning to Philadelphia for several years, she returned to Greeley where she rests with her husband William at Linn Grove Cemetery.