Denver Public Library, Western History Collection [Z-275]

Clara Brown was born a slave in Virginia in 1800. At the age of nine she and her mother were sent to Kentucky to care for their owner's family. Clara married at eighteen and had four children. In 1835, she and her family were auctioned and separated. After her owner died in 1859, she was freed from slavery. Working as a cook, she traveled west on a wagon train that carried gold prospectors to Denver, Colorado. With the aspiration to find her children, and accumulate enough money to purchase their freedom, Brown opened a laundry in Central City, Colorado. By 1866, she had amassed $10,000 ($58,000 in 2004 dollars), including some mining claims and real estate. With the death of two of her children, and having lost track of her son, Clara returned to Kentucky in an attempt to locate her surviving daughter. In 1882, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Brown finally reunited with her daughter and granddaughter, Cindy. Brown was the first black inductee into the Society of Colorado Pioneers.