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Clara Brown key member of Colorado history

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Contributed by: Larry Borowsky on 2/1/2006

In recognition of Black History Month, each week in February a Colorado Historical Society historian will share a story that highlights important people or events that shaped the state's past. Visit www.coloradohistory.org to learn more about the Colorado Historical Society. This story was written by Larry Borowsky, a writer and editor of Colorado history at the Colorado Historical Society.

On a gold-rush frontier where everyone dreamed of striking it rich, Clara Brown gave a fortune away. A humble laundress when she got to Central City in 1859, she amassed her wealth the old-fashioned way, through hard work and shrewd investments. But she used most of her money to help others—out-of-luck miners, religious organizations, schools, and former slaves getting their first taste of freedom after the Civil War. The latter cause had special meaning for Clara Brown—for she herself had been a slave. She spent the first fifty-plus years of her life in bondage on Kentucky plantations, purchasing her freedom for $120 in 1856. But in the twenty-nine years that remained to her, this remarkable woman made the most of her liberty, building a new life for herself—and helping countless other Colorado pioneers do the same.

She was born in Virginia sometime between 1800 and 1806 and sold to a Kentuckian named Ambrose Smith in 1809. Brown married in her late teens and had four children, but when Smith died in 1835, his heirs broke up the estate—and Brown’s family along with it. She, her husband, and her children were scattered among different plantations, a cruelty all too common among Southern slaves. Only her religious faith helped Brown endure this heartbreak. After twenty-plus years’ servitude to her new owner, Brown received an opportunity to purchase her emancipation, and she promptly raised the money. A free woman at last, she went to St. Louis and then to Leavenworth, Kansas, hoping to locate one of the daughters that had been sold away from her in 1835.

In Kansas she met a party of gold seekers bound for Colorado and, thinking she might find her daughter here, Brown joined the group. She arrived in Denver in June 1859 and, a short time later, made her way up to Central City, the focal point of the gold rush. She was the first African-American woman to reach the Colorado gold fields. More important, Clara brown had one of the region’s first laundry businesses, a service very much in demand. After a lifetime of washing clothes for nothing, Brown now could charge the lordly fee of fifty cents per shirt. Her savings rapidly accumulated, and friends advised her to invest the surplus in mining claims and real estate. Within a few short years Brown had acquired interests in several mines, and she owned more than a dozen town lots in Denver, Georgetown, and Idaho Springs, as well as three houses in Central City.

Well before she succeeded financially, however, Clara Brown gained a reputation as a woman of uncommon generosity. She opened her home and her kitchen to Central City’s hard-luck cases, providing food and shelter to busted miners while they got back on their feet. She also nursed the sick, delivered newborns, and took care of anyone who seemed to need a helping hand. But even after she became rich, Clara Brown continued to practice a hands-on form of generosity, sharing not only her funds but also her time and energy. Her compassion stemmed in large part from her abiding religious faith. This, too, she shared freely.

During her short 1859 sojourn in Denver, Brown had met a Methodist minister named Jacob Adriance and hosted Thursday night prayer meetings at her cabin. In 1861 the Reverend Adriance moved to Central City, and Clara Brown joined him in raising funds to build St. James Methodist Church, one of the first Protestant churches in the Rocky Mountains. Much of the funding came out of Brown’s own pocket. She later helped underwrite construction of a Catholic church in town and supported congregations of various other denominations. Shortly after the Civil War ended, Brown returned to Kentucky to search for newly emancipated relatives and friends. She tried in vain to locate her children but she did reunite with other relatives and friends. Later that year she led a group of twenty-six former slaves west, paying for each passenger’s transit.

When the party arrived in Colorado, Brown bought each member a place to live and helped all get jobs or start businesses. Given her indifference toward material wealth, perhaps it’s not surprising that Clara Brown gradually lost her fortune. Denver’s catastrophic flood of 1864 washed out several of her properties and destroyed the title records that established her ownership of several other buildings. An 1873 fire in Central City claimed three more of her houses, including the one she lived in herself. Business downturns and bad luck eroded her finances, but that never stopped Clara Brown from giving. She continued to do so until she could give no more.

By the end of the 1870s, her fortune was gone, and Clara Brown, now too old to support herself, had to rely on the charity she once dispensed so prolifically. But she needn’t have worried; she had built up more than enough good will over the years. Various benefactors rushed to provide for her support, including the Colorado Pioneer Association, of which Brown became the first African-American member. She moved to Denver and lived out her life in relative comfort, an honored member of the community. In 1882 Brown finally heard from the daughter she had searched for in Kansas and had hoped to find in Colorado. She was living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Brown took the train back east for a reunion.

According to the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, “With a scream she jumped from her seat, rushed out of the car, and in ecstasy of joy, mother and child were clasped in each other’s arms.” Such were the riches Clara Brown sought in her life, and such did she accumulate in abundance. The washerwoman with the cleansing touch helped sullied lives get off to fresh starts.

When she died in October 1885, the Colorado Pioneer Association held funeral services at Riverside Cemetery in Denver. With Colorado governor James Grant and Denver mayor John Routt among the mourners, Clara Brown was eulogized as “the kind of friend whose heart always responded to the cry of distress, and who, rising from the humble position of slave to the angelic type of noble woman, won our sympathy and commanded our respect.”

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