Palisade

Under the Cliffs on the Colorado

Palisade sits at 4,718 feet on the banks of the Colorado River, along Interstate 70 about ten miles east of Grand Junction.¹ It is a small Mesa County town known for peaches and a growing wine trade, with 2,565 residents at the 2020 census.¹ Early settlers called the winds that roll down from the nearby cliffs “million dollar” winds, for they keep the valley’s temperatures suited to farming.¹

Harlow’s Homestead and the Roadside Mine

The Ute traveled through the Grand Valley seasonally until 1881, when the US military forcibly moved them to a reservation in Utah and opened the valley to white settlement.¹ In 1882 John P. Harlow tested the soil here, growing vegetables for his wife’s restaurant in Grand Junction.² That year he was also trying peaches on his homestead; the first crop died, and he later succeeded with a fertilizer of burnt bones, ashes, and fish.¹ In 1884 the Roadside Mine, a small coal mine partly owned by Harlow, opened near his farm, and it and other small mines sold cheap coal to residents into the early 1900s.¹ George A. Crawford, who founded Grand Junction in 1881, planted sixty acres of grapes on Rapid Creek near Palisade.³ Before irrigation ditches were dug near the turn of the century, J. L. Oliver and William and Frank Berger hauled barrels of Colorado River water to their orchards.²

The Colorado Encyclopedia’s county article says Palisade was founded in 1895 and named for the towering cliffs that protected its orchards, while its article on the town says it was first founded as a mining location.^1,2 In 1904 Palisade was incorporated and took water rights to Rapid Creek.¹ The Palisade Tribune, published by Clinton H. Martin, had printed its first number on June 6, 1903, and would print its last on Oct. 8, 1987.⁴ Families kept coming: Wayne Aspinall’s arrived from Ohio in 1904 and within a few years had a profitable fruit business, and the great-great grandfather of Harry, later credited with preserving the fruit industry around Palisade, rode a wagon from Iowa to the Grand Valley in 1907.^5,6

The Roller Dam and the Peach Years

The Grand Valley Diversion Dam, begun in 1897 as the Grand River Dam and abandoned until federal money came in 1913, was finished in 1916, and the Colorado Encyclopedia says it was then the largest roller dam in the world.¹ Prohibition ruined the area’s vineyards, and many farmers turned from grapes to peaches.¹ Local inventions, among them a bottom-opening picking sack, an oil-burning smudge pot against frost, and de-fuzzers, pushed up the harvest, and by 1945 the orchards held 852,566 trees, with about a million bushels shipped yearly from 1940 to 1961.² George Bowman formed the United Fruit Growers marketing group in 1923, and it still serves Palisade peach farmers.² In the early 20th century the town often opened its schools late so children could work the peach harvest.¹ Grand Junction held the region’s first peach fair in 1887, and fifty years later Palisade took it over.¹

Under the New Deal the Civilian Conservation Corps set up a labor camp here, and its men shored up the rock walls and buildings at the roller dam and poured concrete for the Highline Canal.¹ The camp later held German prisoners of war who worked the nearby fields, and in 1941 the government opened a cannery in town to put up rations for servicemen.¹ In 1945, when a newly introduced pest from Asia threatened the peaches, farmers turned to the stingless wasp Macrocentrus ancylivorus, and the Palisade Insectary began rearing it; the story “All Abuzz About Beneficial Bugs” calls the Insectary the oldest of the few such facilities in the United States.⁷

The Power Plant and the Vineyards

In 1957 the Public Service Company built a power plant in Palisade; after Xcel Energy and Snowcap Coal Co. shut it in 2010, the town bought it and made it a firearms training complex.¹ The Colorado Limited Winery Act of 1977 made room for small farm wineries, and History Colorado ties the rise of local wine in the 1970s to a decline in peaches and a surge in federal aid.³ Palisade lies in the Grand Valley AVA, and with the plant closed and coal mining collapsed, the wine boom gave the town jobs and tourism.^1,3 Migrant laborers now do much of the work on the peach farms.¹ A Colorado River Highway marker, dedicated to the pioneers of western Colorado, was put up in Palisade in 1931 by Grand Junction Lodge No. 575 B.P.O.E.⁸ A restored migrant worker building from 1901, bought out of Palisade’s Riverbend Park, now serves Carboy Winery as an outdoor stage for music that looks like a tool shed.⁹