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COMMUNITY
FOCUS ON PHILANTHROPY
Ann Bailey
As one of The Historic New Orleans Collection’s first members, Ann Bailey has a deep love of history and philanthropy. And, like THNOC founders Gen. L. Kemper and Leila Williams, she is part of a logging and landowning dynasty that has tied her family to southern Louisiana for generations. A desire to honor that region is what inspired the Williamses’ founding of The Collection, and it’s what keeps Bailey involved with THNOC today. “I think y’all do a wonderful job of preserving the history and culture of New Orleans,” she says.
Like her father and grandfather, Bailey was born in New Orleans and raised in Morgan City, base of operations for the family business, Brownell Land Company. Life in the midcentury Atchafalaya River town “was like Beaver Cleaver—it was great,” Bailey remembers. “I can remember the freedom we had in those days.”
Her father, Russell Brownell, a physician
who trained at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and served in World War II as an army field surgeon, catered to a wide range of the local populace. “I can remember him making house calls, sometimes by boat,” Bailey recalls. “Those were the days when a lot of trappers were still living out [in the swamp].”
Bailey followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a registered nurse, but she soon transitioned to motherhood, an occupation that grew even more important after the untimely death of her husband, Jim Magee, in a plane crash. “Suddenly I was a young widow,” says Bailey, who was only 32 at the time of the accident. Simultaneously mourning her husband and raising three small children, she turned to a lifelong interest to help her cope: horses. Like many little girls, she had grown up longing for a majestic horse to call her own, and upon reaching adulthood, “I bought one as soon as I possibly could,” she said. Her
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l8 The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly