Barney Ford: From Slavery to Breckenridge Businessman
Near Breckenridge, Colorado
This modest house on East Washington Avenue belonged to one of the most remarkable figures in Colorado history, a man named Barney Ford. He was born into slavery in Virginia in eighteen twenty-two. His mother, though enslaved herself, risked everything to teach him to read and write.
As a young man he escaped bondage with the help of the Underground Railroad and made his way north to freedom. Ford proved to be a gifted entrepreneur. In Denver he built barbershops, restaurants, and hotels, including the elegant Inter-Ocean Hotel, earning a reputation as one of the finest hosts in the West.
He brought that same drive to Breckenridge, opening a chop house and, in eighteen eighty-two, building the tidy home that still stands here as the Barney Ford House Museum. But Ford was more than a businessman. He was a civil rights pioneer.
In the eighteen sixties he traveled to Washington to lobby Congress to block Colorado from becoming a state until Black men were guaranteed the right to vote. His campaign helped delay statehood, and Colorado was finally admitted in eighteen seventy-six with voting rights that could no longer be limited to white men alone. Barney Ford died in Denver in nineteen oh two, having climbed from enslavement to the front ranks of Colorado's citizens.
