Margaret Haughery

Margaret Gaffney was born in County Cavan, Ireland, in 1813. Her family emigrated to Baltimore when she was five, and within a few years both parents had died of yellow fever, leaving her to be taken in by a neighbour who put her to work. She never went to school.

In 1835 she married Charles Haughery and the couple moved to New Orleans for his health. Within a year her husband was dead and so was their baby daughter. She was in her early twenties, alone, and could not read. She took work as a laundress at a hotel and gave part of her wages to an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity.

With her savings she bought two cows and began delivering milk from a cart, and from that a dairy grew. During the outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera that hit the city again and again she went from house to house nursing the sick. In 1858 a bakery whose owner owed her money passed into her hands, and she ran it well enough that it became one of the biggest in the South, with the first steam-powered ovens in New Orleans.

She gave her money away as fast as it came, to orphanages and asylums Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. She signed her will with an X. When she died in 1882 the city closed for her funeral, and two years later it put up a statue of her, plain-dressed with a child at her side, simply inscribed "Margaret". It was among the first statues of a woman in the United States.