Finding home: The little-known story of a Black orphanage in southern Colorado

PUEBLO • Black history hides in a dark, dusty bunker on the tumbleweed plains of southeast Colorado where World War I-era chemical weapons were once stored.

Stored here now are reminders of a much different place.

The Lincoln Home “was the only known orphanage of its type in Colorado,” reads the one and only paragraph available on a History Colorado webpage.

From 1906 to 1963, when options were few during segregation, the Lincoln Home took in Black youth as well as sick and lonely seniors. The brick building still stands at the edge of a Pueblo neighborhood, close to where traffic rushes by on Interstate 25.

But the contents of the old home are far from view. They hide out at the old Pueblo Chemical Depot, tucked among the concrete “igloos” that once kept mustard gas, now set aside for public storage.

At the strangeness of it all, Ray Brown shrugs. “I needed something big,” he says, adding the benefit of temperature control here.

The years have seen Brown take up the task of historic preservation — stewarding the past of a people central to shaping Pueblo. They can be traced to James Beckwourth, the born slave who went on to scouting and fur trapping legend in the West. In the 1840s, he helped build the trading post that put Pueblo on the map.

The Lincoln Home would be another symbol of Black ingenuity and community strength. And like that old trading post, it would be largely forgotten by time.

Last year, an-out-of-college historian, Emily Wilson, came to direct the Pueblo Heritage Museum and found information on the Lincoln Home “to be put in a corner and not given much love,” she says. There’s a bed and a desk from the orphanage, some photos of kids and their motherly matrons.

“I think it deserves a lot more,” Wilson says.

She’s here with Brown now in the dark and dusty bunker, looking around at items that might improve the exhibit. There are more beds and furniture pieces, more photos and reminders of life at the Lincoln Home: a sewing machine and wash basin, a piano and organ, a record player that apparently last spun Billy Ward and his Dominoes.

There are boxes upon boxes of newspaper and magazine clips celebrating Black success. These were kept by Ruth Steele, a civil rights icon in Pueblo. She was Brown’s mentor.

“She collected everything,” he says. “I don’t think she threw away a piece of paper.”

She collected things invented by Black people, explaining the traffic light and gas mask here in the bunker. Those are credited to Garrett Augustus Morgan, born to former slaves in Kentucky.

He was one name Steele wanted people to know. Steele died in 2021 with the wish she carried all her adult life: for people to know Black history.

“There’s so much we don’t know,” Brown says.

Building a home

There’s much to learn about the Lincoln Home, Brown says.

The Lincoln Home “was a really great history that we’re still very much uncovering and exploring,” Dexter Nelson II, History Colorado’s associate curator of Black history and cultural heritage, previously told The Gazette.

At 70, just as Brown has tried to identify Black souls buried at the local cemetery — an estimated 650 around one plot, he says, “and only a small portion of them have markers” — so he has tried to identify names that came through the orphanage and old folks home.

Steele told of the Biffles. She wrote of five siblings orphaned here, including Richard Biffle, who served as a Tuskegee Airman and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Brother Nathan Biffle went on to be the Denver Fire Department’s first Black captain.

The Biffles represented “just one story” of the Lincoln Home, Steele wrote: “Many stories could be told about the children who found refuge, guidance and care provided by the matrons.”

The matrons’ names, 25 of them, are honored inside the building today. An ill-fated museum left here 10 years ago, making way for the Friendly Harbor Community Center. People with mental health and substance use disorders find help inside.

A rather obscure sign at the front door recognizes this as the old Lincoln Home, starting in 1914.

“We want to post more out front, a little more robust history,” says Friendly Harbor’s executive director, Michelle Hill.

However out of sight the legacy of the building, it’s not lost on those serving people inside today, Hill says. “It was a home, and it always will be.”

It was a home envisioned by Pueblo’s Federation of Colored Women’s Club, the local group of the Harriet Tubman-founded national organization that raised funds for civic causes.

Women’s clubs statewide were said to have financially supported the orphanage, along with local trustees. The trustees were “among the most prominent members of the city’s Black community,” according to history maintained at Pueblo Heritage Museum.

By the early 1900s, Pueblo’s Black population swelled beyond 1,000 from the 27 counted in 1870. The steel mill started that decade. Just as people from around the world came for work, so too did former slaves and descendants out of the post-Civil War South.

They forged destinies beyond steel. Read the local paper in 1903: “During the past few years there has been a noticeable change in the status of the negro race.”

There were a couple of physicians and surgeons, the paper noted, as well as a few police officers to go with several business owners and highly educated preachers. There was also a highly educated lawyer, William B. Townsend.

He was quoted in the paper saying Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and 13th, 14th and 15th amendments “fixed the status of the negro race by making all its members American citizens.” Townsend concluded: “There is no race problem today; it is race prejudice or, rather, race hatred.”

Beyond the orphanages, hate separated Black Puebloans at theaters, hotels, restaurants and pools. Read a Chieftain article in 1978: “Many early Black mill workers tell of training white apprentices, only to see them get promotions and raises while Blacks remained at the bottom of the ladder.”

Brown has uncovered those stories and stories of rising above.

Those early residents “were important, they were powerful,” he says. “They were concerned about the population and making sure other people were successful.”

This was the aim of the Lincoln Home, he learned from his mentor.

Museum’s rise and fall

Steele wrote of the Lincoln Home being “a safe refuge.” She wrote of a friendly dog, Pepper, escorting kids to and from school; of donated clothes and shoes and Christmas dinners; of a sandbox “where children played and dreamed of tomorrow.”

The Pueblo Chieftain once recounted memories of Clyde Sampson, who was dropped off at the orphanage with his brother. “We did lots of crying at first,” he said.

He and others reportedly settled in. Orphans “grew up and thrived in the caring environment created by the matrons,” Steele wrote.

They “had a good foundation for raising kids,” remarked one who grew up in the orphanage, Floyd Hamlet, during a ceremony in 1996 covered by The Chieftain. “About everybody came out of here successful.”

The ceremony was in celebration of Steele’s decades-long mission to acquire the old home that she saw languish long after the orphanage closed in 1963.

“She was a pusher,” Brown says of his mentor. And she successfully pushed the owner to donate the building to the organization she had previously founded, the Pueblo Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission. (Steele’s most noted achievement was lobbying state government to recognize the holiday.)

The old home would be a museum and cultural center, open in 1999. It would close in 2014 — the result of the very steadfast trait that led to its creation, Brown explains.

Just as Steele pushed, “she alienated people,” Brown says, pushing them away. He says that included the accountant overseeing the museum’s finances and reporting.

“We lost our 501©(3) status,” Brown says. “The county started to tax the building, and we weren’t able to recover from that.”

Keeping the story alive

Brown harbors somber reflections over the museum’s end.

“The community had the opportunity to learn about this place,” he says, “and almost no Black person ever came here.”

They come now and then for the statue beside the Lincoln Home. Steele pushed for it: a larger-than-life imagining of Martin Luther King Jr. with Emmett Till.

But there is no crowd this day, April 4. It’s the day King was murdered in 1968. Three years after Steele’s death, Brown continues the tradition of posting a wreath here at the statue, along with an artistic rendering of the Lincoln Home.

Only a few are gathered around for Brown’s remarks. “You know, the story of Dr. King is a story people won’t soon forget,” he says.

But he worries they’ll forget the story of the Lincoln Home. It’s the story Steele wanted told.

“I always knew that I wanted to restore it and let people know that we are more than welfare and rhythm and blues,” she once said. “I wanted people to know we have a rich culture.”

A culture of camaraderie and empowerment — one she knew existed at the Lincoln Home, amid the hurt and pain of any orphan.

They persevered, one might gather from the dark, dusty storage bunker out on the plains.

They went to school. They played sports. “The kids competed and won trophies,” Brown says.

They catch the eye in the bunker, in the darkest shadows of the very back — trophies shining through.