Louise Wooster

Louise "Lou" Catharine Wooster (born June 12, 1842 in Tuscaloosa; died May 16, 1913 in Birmingham) was an infamous madam who famously assisted the sick and dying during the 1873 cholera epidemic.

Many accounts of Louise Wooster's life varies, as she gave several different reports of her life in both her autobiography (published in 1911), and in various news reports of the time. No known photographs or portraits of her survive.

Early Life

Wooster was born the fifth youngest out of eight daughters, seven of which were currently living at the time of her birth. Her father, William, was an engineer from New York, and her mother, Mary Chism, was a native of South Carolina. They were married in Tuscaloosa in 1838, where Lou was believed to have been born. William Wooster died in 1851 while the family were living in Mobile, leaving Mary a widow with seven children to care for. She eventually married a man name John Williams, who Lou blamed for squandering the family money.

In 1857, Wooster accounts in her autobiography that her second eldest sister, Margaret, left home and became a prostitute at the age of 14, thus shaming the family name henceforth.( After several failed marriages, Margaret later owned a brothel a block over from Wooster's in Birmingham, on 3rd Avenue North, under the name "Maggie Bracken".) Not long after Margaret's "fall", her mother, Mary, along with two of her older sisters, died. Before her death, Mary charged Lou to take care of her two youngest sisters - Julia and Cornelia. These younger sisters were placed in Mobile's Protestant Orphan Asylum on March 16, 1857, against their deceased mother's wishes and the day after her funeral. Lou went to live with her eldest sister, Frances, who was married to a Mr. Van Buren and currently living in New Orleans with another of her older sisters, Jennie. Frustrated with Mr. Van Buren's refusal to take her youngest sisters out of the orphanage, Lou forged a letter in Frances' hand, claiming inability to retrieve the girls due to illness, and asked that they be recieved into Louise Wooster's care. Louise removed her sisters from the orphanage on April 15, 1857 - signing the name Mrs. Van Buren on the release papers.

Refusing to return to her family in New Orleans, Wooster took refuge with Robert A. Harris, a family friend and a future Confederate Major in the First Special Battalion, Louisiana Infantry. In her autobiography, he is described under the psuedonym "Major Robert Haylow". It is to this man that Wooster attributes her subsequent "fall". Though in her autobiography, Wooster claims that she was "barely eleven years old" at the time of her seduction, she was actually around fifteen. Mr. Van Buren, her sister's husband, found Wooster living with Harris, and took her back to New Orleans with him to live with her sisters. She worked as a shop girl in New Orleans for a time, and then briefly in East Pascagoula, Mississippi, when she finally returned to Mobile and Harris. Not long after that, Harris deserted her and Wooster was taken in by another male friend while she had yellow fever, who then left her in the care of prostitutes at a local brothel.

In order to respect her deceased parents, she moved to a Montgomery brothel to become a prostitute herself. After several failed relationships, she made a failed attempt at suicide after a lover was killed from infection after being shot in a fight.

It was then, while living in Montgomery, that Wooster claims to have met John Wilkes Booth. Booth was in Montgomery, starring in several stage roles, from late October to early December of 1880, but other than Wooster's accounts, there is no evidence of a relationship between the two. Aside from the account given in her autobiography, Wooster gave several known false accounts to newspapers years later about where and how Booth and she met, creating a sensation with her conspiracy theory that another man, and not Booth, was killed by federal agents. It was during this time that Wooster claimed to have been inspired to be an actress, and when her and Booth's relationship broke off, she performed as an actress in Arkansas and New Orleans. After suffering a brief bout of tuberculosis, she had to quit her stage career, and in 1869 she moved back to Mobile for a few years.

Role in Birmingham Cholera Epidemic

In 1873, just a few weeks before the infamous cholera epidemic that hit the city, Louise Wooster moved to Birmingham. Her reason for moving was as follows, from her autobiography: "About this time the great and growing Magic City was being incorporated. It was at that time a railroad crossing with a little town of about twenty or thirty houses, and very poor houses, at that. The papers throughout the state were full of Birmingham, and very soon I became absorbed in it. And here I determined to cast my lot."

When the epidemic hit, Wooster was one of several prostitutes and city leaders that stayed in the city to help, when half of the 3000 population fled in panic. Although many of the populace that stayed knew of Wooster's profession, due to the lack of nurses, she was allowed into the homes of the sick to do what she could, even if it was preparing bodies for burial. She also contributed money wherever she could.

The epidemic created a brief economic collapse for the city of Birmingham, and Wooster then left the city for Montgomery, only to fully return in 1881, when she established her brothel.

1873-1884

Not much is known about Wooster during this period. It is known that she is registered in the 1880 Montgomery directory as either operating a boarding house or a brothel that included her youngest widowed sister Cornelia, Cornelia's son, two "lady boarders", and nine African American servants.

Wooster shows up again in 1881 in Birmingham city records as having bought the first of two plots at Oak Hill Cemetery, this being the first property she had ever purchased in Birmingham. Until she returned to Birmingham in 1884, all that Wooster notes in her autobiography that she "would like to drop the curtain for five years", presumably the five years between 1873 and 1884, as "those five years of suffering are too dark for other eyes". She then goes on to vaguely mention her brutal treatment at the hands of a man residing in Montgomery.

Birmingham Brothel

In 1884 Wooster established a brothel on 4th Avenue North in Birmingham. She and her charges demonstrated great care for those afflicted by cholera during the epidemic that year, for which they were praised by Mortimer Jordan, Jr in the Jefferson County Medical Society's report.

Following the outbreak, Wooster established a new house in Montgomery, but had returned to Birmingham by 1880.

When she died in 1913 her lengthy funeral train consisted mostly of empty coaches sent anonymously to honor her passing. Wooster is interred at Oak Hill Cemetery.

The Wooster Lofts, the first loft development in Birmingham, was named in her honor.

In 2007, the UAB School of Public Health inaugurated the Wooster Award for exemplary service in public health. The inaugural winner was Alabama Representative Patricia Todd.

References

• Wooster, L. C. W. (1911) Autobiography of a Magadalen. Birmingham: Birmingham Printing Company.
• Baggett, James (2005) A Woman of the Town: Louise Wooster, Birmingham's Magdalen. Birmingham. Birmingham Public Library Press.
• Baggett, James (Fall 2005) "Louise Wooster: Birmingham's Magdalen." Alabama Heritage.
• Rudd, Steven. City madam finally gets honor she's due. July 1, 2007, Birmingham News. Accessed July 5, 2007.
• Oak Hill Cemetery, Surnames W, Jefferson, Alabama, accessed July 5, 2007.
• Jordan, M. H. (1875) Cholera at Birmingham Alabama in 1873. The Narrative of the 1873 Cholera Epidemic. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office
• "Louise Wooster." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 13 Jun 2007, 23:23 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 5 Jul 2007 [1].