Incorporated as a town to enable the community to enforce vice laws, its anti-alcohol regulations surviving the city's dissolution.

John Evans, the former Colorado governor, contributed to the community's development by fostering the establishment of the two Methodist-organized subdivisions of University Park Colony and Evanston.

Fleming, a young man who had made his wealth in the Pennsylvanian oil industry, sold much of what he owned in the area to permit the community to have transportation and residential development.

[5] A municipal incorporation effort was organized by Fleming, Rufus Clark, and Avery Gallup in early 1886 in response to the saloons, dance halls, and gambling establishments near a racetrack Denver's Overland Park, to allow the area to legally enforce anti-vice laws.

[9] The anti-incorporation nonresident landowners, led by former Rocky Mountain News owner William Byers, hired a law firm and filed a suit in the Arapahoe County district court on November 27, 1886, claiming that the incorporation of South Denver was done illegally.

[16] Elizabeth Warren's donation came with the further stipulation that an additional $50,000 be raised to support the new theological school; a condition university chancellor David Hastings Moore fulfilled.

Clark, a heavy drinker prior to arriving in Colorado with his family in 1859, had been converted during a Denver tent revival by the United Brethren and was engaged in a variety of charitable ventures.

[18] Though not a Methodist, Clark was approached in 1884 about supporting university's move and offered 40 acres of his land as a donation in what was then Arapahoe County.

[20] Clark conditioned this donation on the premises that the community would be laid out in a tree-lined grid and that the sale and production of alcohol would be prohibited, thereby avoiding replicating Denver's "moral and environmental pollution".

[22] The site provided an elevated view of 50 miles along the Front Range but was very rural; an early resident would later recall that rabbits and coyotes outnumbered people in the community for years.

Clark platted a portion his property on the campus land as the Evanston subdivision, which was between modern Jewell and Iliff Avenues from north to south and Race and Downing from east to west.

[34] The building survives at its original location on the northeast corner at the intersection of Evans Avenue and Milwaukee Street as a real estate office.

Despite Johnston's efforts to revive the area as an "elite, cultured university town", the concept of Evanston becoming a "Methodist colony" soon died.

As of 2016[update], some former areas of South Denver such as the University neighborhood had mortgages which retained the old covenants prohibiting alcohol sale and production.