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Clara Brown, February 3, 2026

“The Angel of the Rockies,” “Aunt” Clara Brown, might have been born into slavery in Virginia, but she is remembered as "Colorado's first black settler and a prosperous entrepreneur.” Today, February 3, 2026, Lyles Station Historic School and Museum honors the generosity and faith of Clara Brown. Clara and her mother were sold to Ambrose Smith, a Kentucky farmer, when she was three years old. She attended church services with the family and converted when she was eight; her faith guided her the rest of her life. She married and had four children. Tragedy struck when one daughter died when only eight years old. Then in 1835, Smith died, and the family sold the farm and all the slaves in order to pay the bills. She spent the rest of her life searching for her husband, son, and daughters. George Brown, a Kentucky plantation owner, purchased Clara. In 1856, he passed away, and his will granted Clara her freedom. Kentucky law stated freed slaves had to leave the state within a year or return to slavey. Since she had heard that her daughter Eliza Jane had gone west, she decided to journey westward, hoping to find her. She first headed to St. Louis, then went farther west, working as a cook and laundress, reaching Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1859, during the Colorado Gold Rush. Unable to take a stagecoach due to racial discrimination, she offered to work on Colonel Benjamin Wadsworth’s wagon train as a cook and laundry woman in exchange for her passage. She walked every step of the 700-mile journey, arriving in Denver in June 1859, becoming the first African American woman to arrive in Denver during the Gold Rush; she owned only her washtub and cooking pot. With those two items she would make her fortune. She first worked at a bakery but recognized that the miners, obsessed with the search for gold, needed someone to do their laundry, feed them, and care for them when they were ill. That someone was Clara. She traveled to Central City and opened the county’s first commercial laundry, charging 50 cents per item. She fed the miners and even served as a midwife for their wives when needed. The miners paid well, and their dirty laundry water also paid off. These men panned for gold, and Clara saved the laundry water, going through the sluice to extract gold herself. Clara saved $10,000, almost $250,000 today, investing it in property, churches, and people. She owned seven houses in Central City, sixteen lots in Denver, and property in three other towns. Her home served as the site for the first Methodist church in Central City, where she established the city’s first Sunday School. She also provided funding for the Catholic Church and the first Protestant church constructed in the Rockies. Most importantly, Aunt Clara invested in people, driven by the desire to help others build a new life in the West and to locate her family. Many arrived in Colorado with nothing. Clara provided them a grubstake. Not all found gold, but those who did generously repaid her. She provided funding for slaves emancipated by the end of the Civil War, allowing them to travel west and purchase land and establish homes. Primarily, Clara Brown searched for her family, traveling back to Kentucky. She didn’t find her husband Richard or daughters Eliza Jane and Margaret but brought back sixteen former slaves, paying for their passage and helping them settle in the mining communities. In time, Clara learned that both Richard and Margaret had died in slavery. Her son Richard was untraceable, having been sold many times through the years. She did not give up hope of finding Eliza Jane. Clara's generosity exhausted her wealth. When she was eighty, she had to depend upon others to help her as she had helped them for so many years. She was ineligible for the Colorado pension for pioneers who had arrived before 1865; it was only available for white men. Due to the efforts of her many friends, in 1884, the Society of Colorado Pioneers voted to include Aunt Clara Brown as their first Black member and first female member, making her eligible for the pioneer pension. A letter arrived in 1885 from Council Bluffs, Iowa, with news that Eliza Jane might be living there. Clara’s friends raised money to send her to find her daughter, bringing about the reunion Clara had dreamed of for almost fifty years. Her story has been retold in the books and even an opera. The Angel of the Rockies passed away in October of 1885. The Colorado governor and Denver’s mayor attended her funeral, honoring the legacy that she built with a washtub, hard work, and determination.