Henry Cordis Brown was born on November 18, 1820 near St. Clairsville, Belmont County. He was the son of Polly (Newkirk) Brown and Samuel Brown, a New Englander who fought in the battle of Bunker Hill and late in life moved to Ohio. The mother died when the boy was two years old; the father five years later.
Bound out to work on a farm until he was sixteen, Henry had meager opportunities for an education; such as he had were in the local district school and at Brook's Academy in St. Clairsville.
Henry Brown learned the carpenter's trade and followed it in Wheeling, Virginia, and after 1844, in St. Louis. In 1852 he yielded to the lure of the West and set out on a journey that took him to the Pacific Coast and around South America. He drove an ox-team to California, but not finding a satisfactory opening went on to Oregon and Washington. For eight months he was interested in a saw-mill on Bellingham Bay. He returned to California and for three years worked as contractor and builder in San Francisco.
His restless spirit carried him next to Peru, but after nine months he took passage on a ship bound for the eastern coast of the United States. In May 1858 he was back in St. Louis. After a few months he went to Sioux City, Iowa, and there joined the Decatur (Nebr. ) Town Company.
He built a hotel in the new town of Decatur but that venture soon proved a failure. After a few months in St. Joseph, Missouri, he again turned his face to the Far West. He arrived in Denver in June 1860, realized the possibilities of this straggling frontier town, and settled there. He followed his trade and invested his money in real estate. The basis of his fortune was laid when he secured by preemption 160 acres of land on the outskirts of Denver.
Within that tract are now located the State Capitol--on a beautiful site donated by Brown for that purpose in 1867--and some of the best business and residence lots in Denver. By 1870 he was one of the wealthiest men in Colorado, and was in position to take an active part in the various business enterprises of a growing city.
Large financial obligations incurred in the building of a Brown Palace Hotel that cost more than a million dollars, and the panic of 1893 that followed soon after its completion, seriously impaired Brown's financial power.
He was land poor, and became involved in litigation that lasted until his death in San Diego, California, in 1906.
From 1870 to 1875 Henry Brown was the owner of the Denver Tribune; he was active in the organization of the Denver Pacific Railway, the Denver Tramway Company, and the Bank of Denver. The climax of his business career was reached in the construction in 1889 of the Brown Palace Hotel, which soon became and remains one of the most famous hostelries of the W.
Brown devoted his life to business, but there was something of the dreamer and the poet in his nature; he had a vision of a beautiful city at the gateway to the Rockies, and did much to make that vision a reality.
Henry Cordis Brown was three times married: in 1841 to Anna L. Inskepp at St. Clairsville, Ohio; in 1858 to Jane C. Thompson at Decatur, Nebraska; late in life to Helen Mathews in Denver.
