Fifty for 150: Colorado Black civic leader, businessman Barney Ford dies in 1902

Barney Ford, one of Colorado’s early Black leaders in business and civic life, was among the most influential residents in the years surrounding the state’s admission to the United States.

He was born to a white plantation owner and enslaved woman in 1822 in South Carolina and ran to freedom when he was around 18 years old with assistance from conductors on the Underground Railroad. He met and married Julia Lyon in Chicago, and the duo decided to head to California to find their fortune in gold. They intended to sail around Cape Horn, but stopped in Nicaragua. There, Ford opened his first business, called the United States Hotel and Restaurant. It was a successful hotel until it was burned down during the island country’s war for independence.

Ford and his wife eventually moved to Colorado in 1860 with hopes of finding gold in Breckenridge, part of a group of fewer than 100 Black people in the entire territory at the time. He found a gold claim and began mining on land he owned. Local stories say that armed men threatened Ford against filing the claim and told him to leave town. He decided to head to Denver and work with a white attorney to file the claim on his behalf, historian and advisory board member at the Black American West Museum Stephen Shepard said in a 2021 Rocky Mountain PBS documentary.

“Barney thought he had a deal. He went to Breckenridge and met two other young Black men who were runaway slaves and they started mining and eventually started finding gold dust,” he said.

Ford went into town to trade in some gold for cash and ran into a known thief. “Within a couple of days of being back at the cabin, the sheriff came and gave him papers that the attorney had drawn up, saying that the attorney owned the entire mine and that they had to leave.”

Ford and his partners snuck out the back window and watched the thief ransack the cabin, Shepard said.

He went to Denver, and owned a barbershop by 1863 in the city’s LoDo neighborhood. The business burned during the Great Fire of 1863 the same night Julia delivered their second child. He was able to get a $9,000 loan from Kountze Brothers Bank and opened the People’s Restaurant on Blake Street, which had a barber shop, restaurant, saloon, boarding rooms and his family’s apartment. He paid off his loan 90 days later.

By 1865, Ford had the nickname “Black Baron of Colorado” and was one of the wealthiest men in Colorado by the 1870s, with a large real estate portfolio, including Ford’s Hotel and the Inter-Ocean Hotel in Denver. In Breckenridge, he later opened Ford’s Restaurant and Chop Stand. His family’s 1882 house in town still stands on East Washington Avenue.

Ford left Colorado and initially fought against its statehood because of the plan to exclude Black men from voting in its constitution. He lobbied Congress in Washington, D.C., at the end of the Civil War in favor of Black suffrage and urged lawmakers to delay statehood over the issue.

“His success in terms of advocating for Black suffrage on the state constitution is perhaps his biggest accomplishment,” Larissa O’Neil, the executive director of Breckenridge History, said in the PBS documentary.

Ford finally gave his support to Colorado’s statehood after the 15th Amendment passed, which gave Black men the right to vote.

He was also an advocate for equal public education and started a school for Black Coloradans with fellow civil rights activist Henry Wagoner. He was the first Black man to serve on a Colorado grand jury and was the first Black man on a bank board of directors in Colorado.

The closure of the Inter-Ocean Hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming, bankrupted Ford in 1873. The family moved to San Francisco, but it moved back to Breckenridge to mine once again. Ford died in 1902 in Denver. His legacy remains in Colorado through historical designations on property he owned, inductions into the Colorado Business Hall of Fame and the Colorado Black Hall of Fame, a stained glass portrait in the Colorado Capitol, and a 2022 Barney Ford Day proclamation.