The founding father of Denver’s Korean-American community lay for a century in an unmarked grave at Riverside Cemetery.
On Saturday, the Korean Society of Metro Denver unveiled a granite marker commemorating Park Hee Byung, whose work to free Korea from Japan may have led to his assassination in 1907.
Park first came to America to study mining at Roanoke College in Virginia. He returned to Korea, where he built a school for miners and helped establish diplomatic ties with the United States.
He then returned to North America, first working for the Korean government in Mexico, then coming to Colorado where he organized a movement to free Korea, which was then occupied by Japan.
In 1907, when he was preparing to bring his “Free Korea” campaign to the Democratic National Convention, scheduled to be held in Denver the following year, he was killed. Park was 36.
He had been all but forgotten. “I lived here for 35 years. I went to school here, but I didn’t know about his existence,” said Miok L. Fowler, vice president of Denver’s Korean Society.
In 2003, Korean scholars researching immigration to the U.S. stumbled on records about Park in Korea.
A Korean researcher here began looking through cemetery records to locate Park’s grave, Fowler said. He found it in a forlorn section of Riverside where it was marked only by a number.
About 50 people attended the new marker’s unveiling, including Bon-Woo Koo, consul general of South Korea.
When Park came to Denver, there was little contact between Korea and the United States, Koo said. “Colorado was one of the first areas where Korean people had contact with the U.S. This is very meaningful,” he said of the ceremony.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
