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.
