Laura Bragg

Laura Bragg (October 9, 1881 – May 16, 1978) was a museum director who became the first woman to run a publicly funded art museum in America when she was named the director of the Charleston Museum in 1920. She later directed the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts and advised on the reorganization of the Valentine Museum in Virginia. She is also known for developing a widely copied form of traveling museum exhibition for schools called a "Bragg Box."

Laura Mary Bragg was born in Massachusetts on October 9, 1881, one of three children of Rev. Lyman Bragg and Sarah Jane (Klotz) Bragg. She spent a few of her earliest years in Mississippi, where her father was a professor at Rust University, a college for freed slaves.

At the age of six, Bragg contracted scarlet fever, which left her with progressive hearing loss. Her father consulted on treatment for her at Alexander Graham Bell's Boston school for the deaf. Bragg coped with her partial but incurable hearing loss by learning to lip read and developing an exceptional memory.

Up to high school, Bragg was educated at home. She went to high school in New Hampshire and Massachusetts before going on to Simmons College for a degree in library science. She graduated with the college's very first class, in 1906. In a college biology class, she developed an interest in ferns and would later publish an article on the ferns of coastal South Carolina in the American Fern Journal.

After college, her first jobs were as a librarian, initially on Orr's Island, Maine, and then briefly at the New York Public Library.

In 1909, Charleston Museum director Paul Rea (whom Bragg had met in Maine) brought her to Charleston, SC, to be the museum's curator of books and public instruction. She developed the museum's first educational programs and designed installations in the museum's new building. In 1920, Bragg was named director of the Charleston Museum, becoming the first woman in America to run a publicly funded art museum.

In 1921, she opened the museum to black visitors on Saturday afternoons, less than four years after the museum's own trustees had put in place a policy denying admission to black people.

Bragg also founded the Charleston Free Library during her tenure in the city and was a cofounder of the Poetry Society of South Carolina.

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