Louise Wooster: BIRMINGHAM'S MAGDALEN

Somewhere between truth and legend emerges, the tale of Birmingham's Lou Wooster-heroine, philanthropist, and "fallen woman."

ON A LATE JANUARY DAY IN 1886, black crepe hung from the door of one of Birmingham's best known brothels. There had been a death in the house. Earlier that week, an aging former prostitute named Frances Crayton, now working in the brothel as a housekeeper, had fallen ill. When she took to her bed, a physician was called to her room. With rare exceptions, Frances and her associates were women destined to be discarded by the world and forgotten by posterity. But among those at Frances's bedside was one woman that Birmingham would not only remember, but fondly embrace and absorb into its folklore. Louise Wooster-or Lou, as she was better known-was a successful madam who had claimed a place of honor in the city's underworld. It was Lou whom Frances entrusted with the care of her soon-to-be-orphaned son, and Lou who would pay for the destitute woman's burial. For Lou Wooster was not only successful, but generous-a kind and maternal caregiver. According to the only surviving account (Lou's own), the last word Frances spoke was "Lou."

In newspaper interviews, and later in her own memoirs, Lou Wooster contributed significantly to the creation of her own myth-so much so that it is often hard to distinguish the facts of her life from fiction. The Lou Wooster of legend is both heroic and tragic. She lost her parents early in life, was betrayed by everyone she trusted, and was forced into a life of shame. She found and lost a great love in the actor John Wilkes Booth, the notorious assassin of Abraham Lincoln. She refused to abandon Birmingham during a cholera epidemic, even as half the city's population fled. She became wealthy operating a high-class brothel and used that wealth to aid other fallen women and worthy charities. In her own telling, Lou embodied the Christian virtues of charity and modesty, even as Birmingham's polite society regarded her kind with scorn. The story of her life has proven to be one of the most enduring and popular legends of early Birmingham.

THERE ARE A FEW BASICS ABOUT HER LIFE we can assume to be true. Louise Catharine Wooster was born June 12, 1842, probably in Tuscaloosa. She was the daughter of William Wooster, an engineer from New York, and Mary Chism Wooster, a native of South Carolina. William died in 1851, when the family was living in Mobile. Lou, one of at least five Wooster sisters, was eight years old. Three years later her mother remarried, this time to a man who, according to Lou, abandoned the family and took most of their money with him. Deserted and destitute, Mary Wooster died a few years later, probably in 1857. By her middle teens, Lou was an orphan with nothing to rely on but the mercy of relatives.

It is difficult to document Lou's whereabouts from the late 1850s until the early 1870s, so we must rely on her own accounts in interviews and in her memoirs, which appeared many years later. These accounts often contradict one another and occasionally veer into pure fabrication. According to Lou, her mother's death was hastened when Margaret, one of Lou's older sisters, turned to prostitution to help support the family during their mother's illness. Shortly after the funeral, Lou's two youngest sisters were placed in an "orphan asylum," while Lou lived in New Orleans with a married sister and her overbearing husband. Carrying a forged letter, Lou returned to Mobile and freed her sisters from the orphanage. With no money and nowhere to go, the three girls accepted an offer of "home and protection" from a male family friend. Still a teenager, Lou became infatuated with her newfound benefactor and yielded to his seductions. Later, she returned to New Orleans with her sisters in tow and worked as a shop girl, but eventually went back to her lover in Mobile, who now promised marriage. He settled her in "a lovely little cottage," until without warning or explanation, the man disappeared. Lou developed yellow fever, and the cottage was seized by creditors. Near death, she was taken in by another male friend, who also seduced her, then left her in die care of local prostitutes. According to Lou, this was "one more step on the downward path, and so, from first one cause, then another, step by step, I fell until at last I was beyond redemption."

Out of respect for "my dear dead mother and father," Lou did not want to "embrace a life of shame in Mobile." However, "that seemed die only way open to me now." In the late 1850s, she moved to Montgomery and entered a house of prostitution.

There, she fell in love with a suitor whom she identified only as "die eldest son of one of Alabama's most prominent criminal lawyers," who rescued her from the brodiel and set her up in a small house where they were "perfecdy devoted to each other." The bliss ended abrupdy when he was killed in a fight.

Lou claimed it was around this rime that she met the actor John Wilkes Booth and became his lover. There is scant evidence of a relationship between Lou and Booth excepting her own various accounts, though it is possible that the two met. From late October until early December 1860, Booth was in Montgomery, where he appeared in several performances before packed audiences. He starred as Romeo, Hamlet, and Richard HI and acted in four other productions. Montgomery went wild for Booth, whose fame and appeal was like that of a modern-day rock star. "He was my ideal man," Lou recalled in her autobiography, "handsome, generous, affectionate and brave. My love for him seemed to be reciprocated... . I nursed and cultivated that love, for we were never to be apart, he said." Lou claimed that she became an actress at Booth's suggestion. "We would have our little rehearsals," she recalled, "and he would encourage me and I was for the time truly happy." With the beginning of the Civil War, Booth left Lou to return to his home in Virginia, promising to send for her. They never saw one another again. Booth's assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 destroyed her hope for a happy life with the actor. "I knew he was impulsive, erratic," she wrote, "but I never believed him capable of murder."

Following her supposed relationship with Booth, Lou recounted that she worked as an actress in Arkansas and New Orleans until illness forced her to leave the stage and return to prostitution. "Yes, there I was again," she recalled, "the handsome robes that once trailed behind the footlights and were so admired by an appreciative public dragging the carpeted floors of a gilded palace of sin."

By 1869 Lou was living in Mobile, involved in yet another doomed relationship with a man who would soon be bankrupt as a result of drinking and gambling debts. In later years, she also claimed to have married a Mobile planter "who at the time was wealthy," but lost his fortune during the Civil War and died soon after, leaving Lou with an infant daughter. No evidence of such a daughter exists, however, and this story is almost certainly one of Lou's fabrications.

AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, Alabama's changing economy created new opportunities for women of Lou's profession. Industrialists were pouring into Birmingham to profit from the area's iron ore deposits and the soon-to-be-completed rail lines. The city drew wealthy men hoping to build businesses and poor men hoping to find work. "The papers throughout the state were full of Birmingham," Lou recalled, "and very soon I became absorbed in it myself. I was ambitious." By 1873 she had moved to Birmingham and was working as a prostitute.

But the city's early flush times were short-lived. Birmingham was expanding too quickly. Little thought was given to public sanitation, and access to clean water was limited. In mid-June 1873, a man who had recently arrived in the city was diagnosed with cholera, an often deadly disease that causes severe diarrhea, vomiting, intestinal cramps, and rapid dehydration. Cholera also spreads easily. Anyone nursing its victims is in danger of infection. If not disposed of carefully, the bodily fluids of the sick can contaminate the water supply. The first victim of Birmingham's cholera epidemic died within twenty-four hours. Five days later two children died of the disease. For the rest of June and into mid-July, new cases appeared almost daily. People fled the city on every available train until half the population of four thousand was gone. Businesses closed. Those who did not leave stayed indoors, not understanding how the disease was spread. One survivor recalled, "When we arrived at First Avenue and Twentieth Street, looking in every direction, there was no sign of life as far as the eye could reach. It was six o'clock in the afternoon. We looked and did not even see a cat or dog-everything quiet and not a soul stirring." On the street corners, city officials burned pots of tar in the mistaken belief that it would cleanse the air.

Among those who chose not to flee the city were several prostitutes, including Lou Wooster. The wife of one physician recalled that Lou came to her husband to report "an old man she found," and "as the old fellow seemed to be alone in the world she said she would care for him. She nursed him until he passed away." In her autobiography Lou explained, "I was determined to stay and help nurse the poor sick and suffering ones who needed me." At first she was afraid to offer her assistance because "I had met with so many rebukes and rebuffs and my pride had been so often wounded that I was sore at heart and had become almost a coward. At last I could stand it no longer and timidly offered to nurse the sick, prepare the dead for burial.... I was made happy by the quick and eager acceptance of my offer and so started out to nurse, feeling that now I could do some good."

Birmingham's cholera epidemic killed more than a hundred people, and shortly afterward a nationwide economic panic bankrupted thousands of companies and hundreds of banks. With the boom town of Birmingham nearly bust, Lou returned to Montgomery. By 1880 she was living at the corner of Decatur and Market Street (now Dexter Avenue), across from the presentday Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. She operated a facility that may have been a boarding house, a brothel, or a combination of the two. The household included one of Lou's sisters, a nephew, and two "lady boarders" in their twenties. Nine African American men and women also lived there as servants. If this was a brothel, it was being operated on one of the city's main streets and one block from the Alabama state capitol.

By 1881 Birmingham had begun to recover from the cholera epidemic and subsequent economic collapse. The city was reviving with new mills, mines, and a rapidly growing population. Lou returned and purchased her first property in the city, a lot at Oak Hill Cemetery. Her whereabouts for the next three years are unknown, but in 1884 she bought a two-story building on Fourth Avenue North between Nineteenth and Twentieth Streets. She would later buy the building next door and live in one building while operating her brothel out of the other.

In Birmingham, as in Montgomery, Lou chose a location for her house that put her directly under the eye of local authorities, just across the street from a Birmingham's city hall. Although Lou never revealed her strategy in choosing this spot, it was a good location for cultivating influential men, sandwiched between diree saloons and a livery stable-businesses that attracted local men and travelers. Should any customers become unruly, the brothel was within shouting distance of the police. Lou Wooster was a skilled businesswoman; she would do well in Birmingham.

In addition to good managerial skills, a successful madam needed the cooperation of the police and other local authorities. Lou and Birmingham's other "high class" madams had this service. While prostitution was a crime according to Birmingham's nineteenth-century codes, it was clear that city authorities focused less on eradicating die practice than on keeping prostitutes and their male companions out of the public eye. Those arrested tended to come from the bottom of the prostitution hierarchy-the street walkers-and they were often African American.

The Birmingham police seldom raided brothels, even though their locations were well known. City directories listed the occupation of Lou and her associates as "madam," and named the women who lived in the houses as "boarders." But nineteenth-century businessmen and politicians often used brothels as social clubs, places to spend the evening drinking, earing, and talking with associates. A successful madam could expect protection from her clientele, because she provided a valued service and was privy to political intrigues and personal secrets that powerful men did not want revealed. During almost two decades as a madam in Birmingham, Lou Wooster was apparently hauled into court only once.

About 1901 Lou retired as a madam. She kept the two buildings on Fourth Avenue North and rented the space to other businesses, including a wholesale liquor distributor, a laundry, a jeweler, and a grocer. Around 1908 she moved to a small house on Birmingham's Southside, with her sister, a nephew and servants.

AS SHE GREW OLDER AND MORE PROSPEROUS, Lou traveled throughout the United States and, if her accounts can be believed, to Europe, Australia, and Asia. During these travels, the national press discovered Lou, and she achieved a small degree of celebrity. Stories about her, focusing largely on her supposed love affair with John Wilkes Booth, appeared in newspapers in cities such as Chicago and Cincinnati. According to one paper, Lou kept and treasured "letters, notes, pictures, valuable presents and trinkets that he gave her." Her most spectacular claim was that Booth had not in fact been killed in the days following his assassination of Lincoln but that another man had been shot by federal troops and buried in Booth's grave. Booth, Lou claimed, survived and communicated with her. She was not the first person to make such claims, but her story, coupled with her life as a fallen woman and successful madam, made sensational copy for the nineteenth-century press.

In 1911 Lou published her life story as The Autobiography of a Magdalen. It is likely that she collaborated on the book with James Bryan, better known as Brother Bryan of Birmingham, a beloved Presbyterian minister and street preacher. The book reads as if it were dictated by Lou rather than written by her, and it is as much sermon as autobiography. The Autobiography of a Magdalen is an extensive argument for redemption and understanding, as well as a commentary on the sexual double standards of the time. Lou spent much of her life in the company of men from respectable society, but she could never be a part of that society herself. Lou expressed scorn for Birmingham's "good people," especially the women, whose conventions she dismissed as hypocrisy. Her memoir is also a cautionary tale to other young women who might suffer her fate. Lou warned, "Do not believe every man a gentleman, whose tailor has made him to appear like one." The book has become a classic in Birmingham and is still widely read.

Lou Wooster died at her home on Southside in the early morning of May 16, 1913. She was seventy-one years old. The cause of death was listed as "Bright's Disease," a general term used at the time for degenerative kidney ailments. According to relatives and a servant, Lou drank heavily in her last years. A funeral was held at her home the next morning, and her body was then taken to Oak Hill Cemetery for burial. One newspaper estimated that Lou's property and other assets were worth a hundred thousand dollars. This is likely an exaggeration, but not by much. Her relatives and her business manager spent the next year in court fighting over the estate.

LOU WOOSTER'S LEGEND DID NOT DIE WITH HER. Admirers continue to embellish her story. It is frequently said that on the day of her funeral, prominent Birmingham gentlemen sent their drivers in empty carriages to escort her body to the cemetery. Propriety kept the men from attending in person, but the parade of empty carriages stretched for blocks. It is a story that Lou would have undoubtedly liked, but it is unlikely that it actually happened. According to one newspaper account, Lou was taken to her grave "practically unescorted," and no other newspaper mentions such an unusual spectacle.

Another popular story is that Margaret Mitchell, who lived in Birmingham briefly before writing Gone with the Wind, used Lou Wooster as the model for the character Belle Watling, the wise and generous Atlanta madam. Yet again, there is little evidence to support this claim and much to suggest that Mitchell actually based the character on a madam from her husband's hometown of Lexington, Kentucky.

The complete truth about Lou Wooster's life may never be known. We can afford to cast aside a few scraps of her legend. Her heroism during the cholera epidemic and the publication of her autobiography assured her place in Birmingham history. Most general histories of the city mention her, and she has been the subject of numerous newspaper and magazine stories. In recent years, there has even been an opera written about her life. One of Birmingham's downtown buildings, renovated into apartments, is called Wooster Lofts. Aside from these few examples, there is little in Birmingham today that connects directly back to Lou Wooster. A handful of surviving first editions of her autobiography can still be found, and one of her scrapbooks is preserved in the archives of the Birmingham Public Library. The two buildings on Fourth Avenue North, where she lived and operated her brothel, were torn down decades ago and the site is now a parking lot. The cottage on Southside where she lived her last years was razed in the 1940s and replaced with a dental clinic.

In the ways she sought to secure her legacy, Lou Wooster portrayed herself as a romantic figure, downplaying the more exploitative aspects of her character. In death, she has achieved the kind of status and respectability that she was never fully granted in life because of her profession. She is perhaps best remembered as a charitable friend of the sick and downtrodden. Today, her grave is one of the most visited sites at Oak Hill Cemetery in Birmingham. The simple inscription on her stone, "Departed but not forgotten," is truer than she could have imagined.

JAMES L. BAGGETT is head of the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Birmingham Public Library and Archivist for the City of Birmingham. Many people earned the author's gratitude for their assistance in researching Lou Wooster, especially Don Veasey, Yolanda Valentin, Gigi Gowdy, Yvonne Grumpier, Beth Willauer, Becky Scarborough, Cheri Todd, Jason Burks, Michelle Andrews, David Ryan, Barbara Wilson, Jim Murray, Stuart Oates, Ricki Brunner, Norwood Kerr, Wayne Cawthon, Christine Cramer, Sandra Bolton, Mary Rose-Taylor, Donna Cox, Regina Ammon, Mary Beth Newbill, and Barry Vaughn.

For more information on the history of prostitution in Birmingham, see "Prostitution in Birmingham, Alabama, 1890-1925," by Ellin Sterne (M.A. Thesis, Samford University, 1977). For a good history of prostitution in the United States during Lou Wooster's era, see The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 by Ruth Rosen (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Two recent books examine the life of John Wilkes Booth and the legend that he was not killed in 1865. These are American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W. Kauffman (Random House, 2004) and The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy by C. Wyatt Evans (University Press of Kansas, 2004).

In October 2005, the Birmingham Public Library Press will republish Lou Wooster's autobiography and other related material in the book A Woman of the Town: Louise Wooster, Birmingham's Magdalen. For more information contact the author at (205) 226-3631 or jbaggett@bham.lib.al.us.

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