Julia Bullard Nelson (1842–1914) was an American temperance and women's rights activist from Red Wing, Minnesota.

Following the death of her husband and their only child, she went south to Texas, in 1869, to teach former slaves in U.S. government-backed Freedmen's Bureau schools.

Nelson spent the summers of the 1870s and 1880s in Minnesota, where she emerged as a state and national leader in the movement for women's suffrage and the temperance campaign against alcohol use.

Newly widowed, the twenty-six-year-old teacher decided to put her teaching skills to use for a greater cause by educating newly-freed slaves in the South.

Congress had created the Freedmen's Bureau to assist newly-freed slaves in adjusting to their release following the Civil War.

[1] In the early 1880s, Nelson, a member of the Minnesota Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), assumed duty as a public speaker for the group.

In 1881, she joined fourteen other women, including Dr. Martha George Ripley and Sarah Burger Stearns, in forming the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA).

[1] Her heavy schedule convinced Nelson to recruit twenty-one-year-old Jeremiah Patterson, a freed slave and former student, to run her Belvidere farm south of Red Wing.

This black–white business partnership, rare in Minnesota at this time, proved unsuccessful, but the Pattersons and their children continued to live in Red Wing.

[1] Julia B. Nelson continued her demanding work but by the winter of 1912, at age seventy-one, she was feeling the effects of bronchitis.