Before my trip to Denver, I knew there was a woman named Molly Brown who survived the Titanic disaster because, some time in my childhood, I saw a musical on TV starring Debbie Reynolds called The Unsinkable Molly Brown. I vaguely remembered Molly Brown was a rich lady who bossed people around in a lifeboat, and they all survived. That was about it. I must have been pretty young.
I didn't remember that she was from Denver, let alone anything else about her.
When you visit Denver, you find out pretty quickly that her former home, located a few blocks from the State Capitol, is high on the vistors' list. The first thing you learn when you arrive at the house is she was never called "Molly" — that was an invention of the Broadway musical's creators. For some reason, they didn't think "Unsinkable Margaret" rolled off the tongue well enough.
It's a good-sized Richardsonian Romanesque house, not really a mansion, though it was a very comfortable dwelling for the 1890s period when it was built, with four bedrooms on the second floor and two maids' rooms (like this) on the third:
It had one indoor bathroom on the second floor as well. The bathroom is the best-preserved room in the house, in terms of original fixtures and wall and floor treatments:
I didn't take photos of the three larger bedrooms (those of Margaret, her husband, and daughter). This is their son's room, at the back of the house. The wallpaper was recreated from a degraded swatch found behind wallboard when the house was restored:
There's a lot to see and learn about Margaret's experience on the Titanic, of course. One detail for the observant is in the library, where Jules Verne's 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea is shelved next to The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters:
The museum provides a laminated reproduction of Margaret's insurance claim for the items she lost on the Titanic. Altogether, it was just shy of $28,000 in 1912 dollars (about $870,000 today):
Of that total, most of it was $20,000 (about $622,000 today) for a single necklace, which is described simply as "1 necklace." That's it. Not even "diamond necklace" or whatever. I assume her insurance company had a separate record for it, but who knows?
Margaret had a lot of other things going on before and after the Titanic, and that was the most interesting part of the museum, aside from learning about the restoration of the house itself. She was involved in labor rights for miners in Colorado (her husband owned a mine, which was the source of their wealth). The basement of the museum has more information on the history of mining in Colorado, and miners' struggle for safe working conditions and better hours.
Even more famously at the time, Margaret was a suffragist, and for a time she ran for U.S. Senate in 1914. This is a cutout of her, set up in part of her bedroom:
Finally, there was a small display at the back of the house about the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. That took place around the time the Browns moved into the house in Denver, and they attended the Exhibition.
I was taken with the lettering on the cover of this folio of water colors:
I also spent some time reading a panel that accompanied the displays about the Exhibition. It read, in part:
Inequality at the Fair
The World's Fair committees did not allow Black and Indigenous Americans to represent themselves at the Fair. They were treated as foreigners and their exhibits were mostly limited to the entertainment strip...
The West's Indigenous peoples were incorrectly thought to have been eradicated. A statue created for the fair of a Native hunter, now at the Colorado State Capitol, implied that the time of the Native peoples was over, and the frontier was 'won.'
Frederick Douglass, born into slavery in Maryland, was appointed to represent Haiti, not America. He gave out a pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition. In it he wrote that slavery's "asserted spirit remains."
1893: nearly 30 years after the end of the Civil War, 25 years after passage of the 14th Amendment, but just a few years before the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.
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