The Colorado Adventure

Nite at the museum

I’m so cheap, that’s why I love Denver arts week and Denver’s night at the museums. Every November Denver has an open house of museums (at night) the list includes: DAM, DMNS, DCAM, CO. history, Children’s, Black American, Littleton historical, MOA, Molly Brown house, Byers-Evans house, and more. We’ve been to so many that there are only 3 places left for us to go next year, then we’ll have to start all over! This year I picked 4, but we ended up at 2 due to time constraints. Enjoy the trip (sorry no pics inside the Molly Brown house because they said so.)

We started at the Black American west museum because we had never been there before.

As we wandered the rooms checking out black cowboys, frontier life, Tuskegee airmen and soldiers we listened to cowboy music played live from downstairs.

We met up with people in costume who gave us an oral history of their lives. This is Julia Ford, wife of Barney Ford.

He was a runaway slave and Denver black pioneer.

He came here and staked a gold mine, but blacks couldn’t have mines in their names. He let a lawyer handle it and that snake took his mine and fortune away from Mr. Ford. Undeterred he started a barber shop in Denver, after a fire burned down much of the city (including his barber shop) he started again. He was an amazing businessman. He had a hotel and restaurant (which is still standing on Blake street) in Denver and a hotel in Breckenridge. He knew he was very blessed and so decided to give back to his race and his home of Denver. He became involved in politics (blacks had lost the right to vote at this time) and actually delayed Colorado from becoming a territory for 10 years because blacks were not given the right to vote. Finally, senators came to him asking for help in getting the territory law passed, it did, but only after it included blacks gaining the right to vote. We also talked about Aunt Clara Brown, we heard her story from an actress with the Fox theater.

Both of these folks are buried in Riverside cemetery in Denver. We also knew about the Buffalo soldiers because of our visit to the Buffalo soldier museum in Houston, so the lady thought we were very well informed. Our HS group is actually going here for a field trip this week, but we can’t make it, so I made sure we made it tonight.

Next we went to the Molly Brown house museum. We were guided by flashlights up the steps and lanterns marked the path.

Grace thought we were exploring the museum in the dark (an actual thing at the CU Boulder museum recently) but I told her no, we were just at the museum at night.

The house was ok, it was a bit disappointing because there wasn’t too much original stuff in the kitchen or in the bedrooms, but it was made up and decorated nicely. The girls thought it was weird that Mr. and Mrs. Brown slept in different rooms (how did they make kids if they slept in separate rooms?) J.J. Brown and his wife became instant millionaires in Leadville after an engineering invention.

They had this house built on Pennsylvania street in the park avenue neighborhood. It’s just a few blocks from the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception where Mrs. Brown was a patron.

Actually Molly Brown isn’t Mrs. Brown’s name, after the Titanic incident the papers started calling her that so she’d seem more Irish (she was the daughter of Irish immigrants.) Her real name was Margaret, she liked to socialize and was involved in many philanthropic adventures. She’s most famous for being a Titanic survivor, leading the rowboat she was in to go back for people and taking a leadership role amongst the women survivors. We got to meet her alter ego as we left, Hannah thought that was neat.

I love adding to the knowledge of our city that we gain when we go exploring new places and old. If you want to find out more about a few Denver characters go here. Now we know about more characters that made Denver the great city we live in, I have to go find Mr. Ford’s restaurant now!