Julia Greeley was known as Denver's "Angel of Charity," and was an important part of Denver's community in her time despite a traumatic background. Born a slave in Missouri, her right eye was permanently maimed by a slave master’s whip at a young age. After gaining her freedom at the end of the Civil War, she emigrated to Colorado to work as a domestic servant. She was among the first Black Christian pioneers in Colorado.

Julia was truly an angel in her charitable works. She was very poor herself and analysis of her remains showed terrible arthritis. Despite this, she became famous for walking miles at night with a mattress on her back or pulling a red wagon loaded with supplies for a poor family. When a family was too proud to ask for charity, she would beg for them. She spent what little money she did earn helping the poor. She was especially well loved by the city’s firefighters, who she tended to in the wake of tragic losses.

Stories abound of her warm personality. At one time, she entered her church’s beauty competition. Voters had to pay 10 cents per vote. Despite living a hard life and a maimed eye, she rallied her firefighter friends and many others to her cause, winning the competition while earning about $300 for her church. In another incident, one of her friends had lost a child due to its inability to digest food, and was told that she could not have further children. Julia told her friend that in one year she would come back to find a little angel running around. Sure enough, her friend had a daughter, whom Julia became the nanny for. The only picture we have of her is taken with that baby girl in McDonough Park.

When she died in 1918, hundreds of people from all walks of life showed up for the wake of this humble domestic worker. She is the only person whose remains are interred at the Denver cathedral. An amazing fixture of Denver’s history despite terrible adversity in her upbringing, renaming McDonough Park for her would be a great way to move forward from the past and honor a great role model relevant to modern times.