Laura Bragg

She is also known for developing a widely copied form of traveling museum exhibition for schools called a "Bragg Box."

[1]: 1, 6 [2][3] She spent a few of her earliest years in Mississippi, where her father was a professor at Rust University, a college for formerly enslaved people.

Bragg coped with her partial but incurable hearing loss by learning to lip read and developing an exceptional memory.

[4] After college, she worked as a librarian for one year on Orr's Island, Maine, where she introduced a children's nature program.

[7] Other museums—including the American Museum of Natural History in New York—picked up on this idea and incorporated Bragg Boxes in their own educational outreach programs.

[1]: 3  It was actually during her subsequent tenure at the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts that these traveling exhibits gained their name of Bragg Boxes.

Her sudden departure left the library in a difficult situation [11] Bragg was also a cofounder of the Poetry Society of South Carolina in 1920 along with DuBose Heyward, Josephine Pinckney, Hervey Allen and John Bennett.

Bragg had a Society poetry prize named for herself, which awarded the ‘‘best poem of local color possessing a universal appeal.

[4] Bragg adapted natural sciences curriculum, changing references to local plants to allow students a richer educational experience.

[4] Bragg taught a post-graduate museum studies course at Columbia Teacher's College in New York City during their summer session in the 1920s.

[4] Bragg is listed as the 'nature study' teacher at the Confederate College in Charleston, South Carolina for the 1913-1914 school year.

She had many romantic friendships with women and several Boston marriages, notably with Hester Gaillard, Belle Heyward, and Helen Gardner McCormack, who became a protégé of Bragg's at the Charleston Museum.

[8] Prior to Heyward's death, Helen Gardner McCormack had been Bragg's assistant at the Charleston Museum.

[13] Virginia Military Institute cadet Li Rendao who often visited friends at The Citadel referred to Bragg as their "international mother.

[15] She continued to correspond with students after graduation, keeping in contact until the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Photo of Laura Bragg at age 85
Laura Bragg's bookplate