This photograph , courtesy of the Denver Historical Society, shows Molly and her husband J.J. with their two children Larry and Helen. This was taken around 1890 while the Browns were still living in Leadville Colorado, and before they struck it rich. It was taken out of doors in front of a painted backdrop made to look like a wealthy home. Little did Molly know that within a few years she would be actually living the high life of which she then only dreamed.

John Tobin, Molly's father, was born in 1823 in Ireland. At this time most native Irish lived as tenants of British landowners. The Irish were dependent upon a single species of potato, which they grew in small plots as the main staple of their diet. In the 1840's the potato crops repeatedly failed due to a blight or disease. The British government did not respond to the resulting famine. Hundreds of thousands of people starved to death. Even more were evicted from their homes because the landlords did not want to pay for food relief for their tenants. Young men and women left Ireland in droves, crossing to America in the cheapest fashion possible, often booking passage on so-called coffin ships. These ships earned their names because of the unsanitary conditions on board. Many thousands died en route and were buried at sea. From these horrific roots came Margaret Tobin Brown's devotion to helping oppressed people.

Between 1845 and 1860, four million Irish immigrants came to America. John Tobin sailed to Charleston, South Carolina with his uncle. The date of his arrival is unknown. However, by 1856 he had moved to Harper's Ferry, Virginia with his first wife, Bridget Pickett, who bore him Molly's half-sister Catherine Bridget Tobin, called Katie. Bridget died soon after, and John and Katie traveled to Hannibal. Like most Irish immigrants, John Tobin was poor and uneducated, with no skills outside of farming. After the horror of the potato famine, most Irish-Americans did not want to rely on crops for a livelihood. Instead they became laborers, performing the backbreaking jobs that built the railroads and factories springing up all over America in the industrialization of the 1850's and 60's.

John Tobin found work digging ditches for the new Hannibal Gas Works which provided illumination gas for the businesses and homes which could afford the new utility. The Gas Works were located just two blocks east of his house. Gas was a luxury many people could not afford. The Tobins continued, like most Irish workers, to light their homes with candles and oil.

John Tobin met his second wife, Johanna Collins, herself a widow with a young daughter, Mary Ann, in Hannibal's poor but thriving Irish community. The Catholic Church provided not only religious support, but was the center of the Irish community. The 1860 City Directory contained a description of the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, which in six years had grown to 1500 largely Irish members. It is believed that John and Johanna met at a church function.

The house in which Molly was born was located in an area of Hannibal then known as "Irish Shanty Town." The dirt streets were lined with small cottages like Molly's house. Butler Street (then called Prospect) was not paved until the 1960's! The Tobin family was a close-knit Irish Catholic family. They were active in the Hannibal Parish and had many distinctly Irish traits. Her mother Johanna and father John spoke with thick Irish brogues. Her mother was known to like smoking a clay pipe and having a cup o' tea to relax. The little house vibrated with life. John and Johanna had four children together, Daniel born 1863; Margaret (called Maggie by her family) born 1867, William born 1869, and Ellen born 1871. The sixteen by thirty-foot house must have seemed crowded at times. In the Irish tradition, the basement room next to the kitchen housed the family cow and chickens at night, as there was no room on the tiny lot to build a separate barn or shed.

Directly across the street from Molly's house lived Johanna's sister, Mary O'Leary. Molly attended the subscription school Aunt Mary conducted in her house and received a basic grammar school education. But at age thirteen she was expected to get a job to help support the family.

Molly got her first job down the hill in the four-story brick Garth tobacco factory on Palmyra Avenue. Tobacco was a major crop in Northeast Missouri at the time, and there was a dozen tobacco establishments in town. The first Americans to settle in the Hannibal area came from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee, and they were familiar with tobacco farming. It continued to be a major crop into the early 1900's. Men, women and children worked in the factories, preparing the leaves for export, or rolling them into cigars. Molly's job was likely to strip the tobacco leaves from the stems. It was dusty, unhealthy work, and they were worked 12-hour days, six days a week. There were no labor laws at this time regulating the use of children in factories. This experience certainly influenced Molly's crusade for reform as an adult.

Molly later went to work in the Park Hotel located on the northeast side of Central Park. It is here that the myth arose Molly met Mark Twain and that he told her to move west to find fame and fortune. Twain of course had left Hannibal when he was 18 in 1854, years before Molly was born. He did return on a few occasions, such as in 1882, while on a book tour. Fifteen-year-old Molly may have caught a glimpse of the famous author, but it is unlikely they ever had a conversation. Nevertheless, Molly always followed Twain's career, and later in her life wrote an article about Twain and Hannibal for the Denver, Colorado newspaper. She also was in Hannibal for the dedication of the Tom and Huck statue on Cardiff Hill in 1926. She was instrumental in getting his works transcribed into Braille for the blinded soldiers during WWI. Thus there was a definite connection between these two Hannibalians.

Molly did have an opportunity to move west when she was 18. Molly's older sister Mary, and her husband Jack Landrigan, moved to Leadville, Colorado to work in the mines in 1883. Three years later, Molly and her brother Daniel followed. Leadville was a rough and tumble mining town. A large portion of the business district was made up of variety halls, saloons and houses of ill repute. Molly avoided the tawdry side of Leadville life and took a job as a clerk in Daniels, Fisher and Smith's Emporium, one of the numerous dry-goods stores on Harrison Avenue.

In Leadville, Molly continued to be active in the Catholic Church. It was at a Church of the Annunciation function that Molly met James Jacob "J.J." Brown, a mining engineer. Also the son of Irish immigrants, Brown was employed by "Leadville Johnny" Campion. ) In later years some people wrongly assumed Molly was married to Leadville Johnny, and Hollywood perpetuated this myth in the 1963 movie "Unsinkable Molly Brown.") After a six-month courtship, Molly and J.J. were married in September, 1886. She was 19; he was 32.

They spent the first seven years of their marriage in Leadville, leading the type of working class lifestyle Molly had been accustomed to in Hannibal. They had two children during those years: Lawrence (Larry) in 1887 and Ellen (know as Helen) in 1889. In fact Larry was born in the Hannibal house on Denkler Alley and Butler, as Molly returned home for mother Johanna to midwife Molly's first baby. By the time Helen was born, the rest of the Tobin family (except for older sister Katie, now married to John Becker) had also moved to Leadville.

During his years as a mining engineer for the Ibex Co., J.J. Brown developed a method of shoring up the walls of mines with bales of straw that allowed the mines to dug deeper than before. In 1893, this lead to the biggest strike of gold known at that time. J.J. Brown was rewarded with a one-eighth ownership in the mine known as the "Little Jonny." This made the Browns millionaires (at a time when a million was a lot of money!). Molly moved the family to Denver in 1894 where they bought the "House of Lions" a mansion on Pennsylvania Street in the fashionable Victorian district of the capitol city.

Molly set about not only to buy a nice house and fancy clothes, but to better her education. She hired tutors and learned to speak five more languages: French and German quite well, and Spanish, Italian and Russian. She also had the means to travel the world and practice these languages. She became a travel writer for the Denver Times newspaper, and wrote of her adventures, such as crossing the Alps in a Mercedes limousine. When abroad, Molly furthered her interest in the arts. While in Switzerland, she hired a master yodeler, and became adept at yodeling. In Spain she learned to play classical guitar. Back in the States, she was one of the first women to attend the Carnegie Institute. Molly studied acting in the style of Sarah Bernhardt.

Back in Denver, Molly was very much a part of the society set. A myth arose that she was ostracized, but that is based on the a group known as the "Sacred 36." Mrs. Crawford Hill, self-appointed queen of Denver society, decided there were only 36 families worthy of her association. The Browns were one of over 200 other couples on the social register not included in Hill's elite 36. Nevertheless, Molly was the woman most sought to head up charitable fund-raisers, as she was such a bundle of energy.

For the Catholic Church, Molly organized a "Carnival of Nations," in 1906 based on the St. Louis World's Fair she had attended in 1904. Being the progressive person she was, she included booths not only for the mainstream European nationalities, but also for the African -Americans, the Chinese-Americans, and the Native-Americans. While she raised a few eyebrows, the festival was a hit! She also became friends with Denver's Judge Ben Lindsey who organized the nation's first juvenile court system, for which Molly raised funds by donating the proceeds of a Cripple Creek mining operation.

Molly also became very involved in politics, as Colorado was one of the first states to give women the right to vote in the 1880's. She became a suffragette and attended national rallies on women's rights in places like Newport, Rhode Island, where the Browns rented a summer house. This is where she met and became friends with the truly rich and famous of the United States, such as the Vanderbilts and the Astors.

Another of her causes was the union movement. She never forgot what it was like to work in a factory back in Hannibal. She was on the picket lines with the United Mine Workers, and the United Garment Workers, fighting for improved labor conditions. After the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado, she was there with Mother Jones aiding the relief work for the victims of that strike.

As for her family, things were not so good. Perhaps in part due to her political activity, and part due to J.J.'s extramarital activity, in 1909, Molly and her husband legally separated. They never did re-unite, although they never divorced. Even after J.J. died in 1922, Molly did not re-marry (although she had offers).

The children, Lawrence and Helen, were sent to boarding schools in Europe when they were older. Larry married in 1910 at age 23 to Eileen Horton of Kansas City, Missouri and had two children, Lawrence, Jr. and Betty. He divorced Ellen in 1915, remarried her in 1917, served in WWI, and was divorced again from Eileen in 1927. Subsequently he married a Hollywood silent movie actress, Mildred Gregory, and settled in California. Daughter Helen married a New York publisher, George J. Benziger in 1913 and had two children, James and Peter. Molly was traveling in Europe and did not attend Helen's wedding. Helen lived until 1969, long enough to see her mother's life immortalized on stage and screen. However, Helen was not happy with the portrayal, and in fact did not attend any of the events. Helen had her parents buried at the Benziger plot on Long Island, at the Holy Rood Cemetery.