Margaret Brown, the Unsinkable

Margaret Tobin Brown was born in eighteen sixty-seven and died in nineteen thirty-two, and she is one of the most famous people Colorado ever claimed, though the name most people know her by is one she never used. Friends called her Maggie. The nickname Molly was popularized only after her death, when the writer Gene Fowler used it in a book published in nineteen thirty-three, and newspapers followed.

In eighteen ninety-four she and her husband, who had struck it rich in the mines near Leadville, bought a Victorian mansion in Denver that still stands today as the Molly Brown House Museum. Margaret threw herself into civic life. She helped found the Denver Woman's Club, and she campaigned for women's voting rights, for children's education and literacy, and for the welfare of miners and their families.

Her enduring fame, however, came from a single night at sea. She was aboard the Titanic when it struck an iceberg and sank in nineteen twelve. She left the ship in lifeboat number six, and during the long hours afterward she urged the crew to row back toward the wreckage to search for survivors.

The label Unsinkable stuck. She spent the rest of her life using that fame to advance the causes she cared about.