AUNT CLARA BROWN:  PART I - THE WOMAN HERSELF

by Pam North

Clara Brown is one of Colorado's legendary figures, an ex-slave who was
part of the historic gold rush days, and who later became a resident of
Gilpin County's Central City.

Assembling a complete chronicle of Clara Brown's life is a challenging
task.  Conflicts abound in the sketchy information on her early years.
Bits of truth are embedded in fuzzy and often embroidered accounts that
have shifted details of time and place.  Was she born in 1800 or 1803?
Was her birthplace in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, or Galatin,
Tennessee, or perhaps Kentucky?  Because Clara was born a slave, her
status in the world was considered by slave owners to be equivalent to
that of livestock or other pieces of personal property.  Records were
seldom kept as to dates of birth, and the later recollections by even
Clara herself
sometimes seemed to be fragmentary and contradictory.

Most of Clara's years of servitude were spent in Kentucky, where slavery
tended to be slightly more benign compared to the Deep South, so it
would seem that her bondage, although evil in itself as the loss of
freedom, at least might not have exposed her to those extremes of
violence often endured by slaves in other states.

Clara's adult life is easier to track, as its important facts tend to
dovetail, leaving less room for conjecture.  Clara married in her
eighteenth year and had four children:  three daughters, Margaret, twins
Eliza Jane and Pauline Ann, and a son, Richard.  When Clara was in her
thirties, her family was split up when her husband and children were
sold to other slave owners, and by her mid-fifties, Clara apparently had
lost all contact with them.  She never remarried, and she never lost
hope that she someday would be reunited with her remaining children
(Pauline Ann had died at the age of eight years, and Margaret died a few
years after the family was separated).  Also, by her mid-fifties, Clara
had come to be known as "Aunt" Clara Brown, a respectful term often
given to older black women.

In 1856, Clara's owner, George Brown, died, and somehow in the settling
of his estate (and perhaps accomplished with purchasing her liberation
herself), Clara became a free woman.  She journeyed to St. Louis,
Missouri, a city that was more favorable to freed blacks, and one
coincidentally that had become a staging area for travelers headed
farther west.  Clara then relocated to Leavenworth, Kansas around 1858,
and it was there that she acquired the laundry tubs that would be the
mainstay of her lifetime occupation as a laundress.  She may have had
some notion that her daughter, Eliza Jane, might similarly have been
drawn west, so Clara, despite her age, elected to travel by wagon train,
serving as a cook, to Denver, arriving in 1859.  After a few months, she
moved on to Central City, then a chaotic muddle of tents and shacks, and
she offered her laundry services to the miners, millworkers and
merchants populating the area.  Her perseverance and hard labor was
lucrative enough to allow her to accumulate enough money to live
comfortably and wisely invest her extra savings in real estate, and by
the early 1860s she had become a respected and important part of the
community, prospering as a shrewd businesswoman, contributing to a
number of fledgling churches, and often personally tending to the ill.

Clara, having been deeply religious all her life and believing her real
riches would be in heaven, viewed money mostly as a necessity for
continuing to look for Eliza Jane.  The end of the Civil