Evans briefly rose to prominence when the first Denver Pacific Railroad engine arrived in December 1869 and the town became Colorado's main transportation hub as the railroad's end point and closest depot to Denver, but that advantage faded the next spring when the line crossed the South Platte and continued toward Denver, shifting most commercial activity away. The town revived when the St. Louis-Western Colony brought four hundred settlers in the summer that followed, and for decades Evans served as an agricultural supply town and highway service stop before becoming more residential during late twentieth-century Front Range suburban growth while retaining its rural character. The Denver Pacific itself, completed on June 22, 1870, under the leadership of former territorial governor John Evans, linked Denver to the transcontinental line in Wyoming after the transcontinental railroad had bypassed Denver, and although it was briefly headquartered in Evans, it primarily secured Denver's rise as the region's economic capital. Dearfield, founded in 1910 by Oliver Toussaint Jackson as Colorado's largest African American colony, sought to offer African Americans freedom from wage labor, urban slums, and racial prejudice through landownership and self-sufficiency; despite early hardship, it grew from seven families to a town of seven hundred with 15,000 acres under cultivation by 1920 before drought, low prices, and debt reduced its population to twelve by 1930, and Jackson died there in 1948 still committed to that ideal. These communities formed part of Colorado's broader agricultural colony movement, in which communal settlements pooled labor, capital, and water for mutual benefit and often pursued moral reform as well as farming, helping establish lasting communities and making the region especially fertile through cooperative irrigation. Evans also took part in the temperance era: its own prohibition law of 1874 lasted only two years, while nearby Greeley remained dry for a century, and broader temperance activism in Colorado contributed to a statewide liquor ban in 1915 before that experiment ended in 1933.