Elizabeth Boland-Barbieri walks into Starbucks clutching a giant roll of paper, grins, and starts to unfurl it—except her arms won’t stretch wide enough. “I brought this entirely for effect,” she says, letting go of one edge. The paper rolls back into hiding, fast as a Slinky. “There are 1,300 names on this Mullanphy family tree. So be careful—you may be talking to a Mullanphy and not know it.”
The name, you see, died out. John Mullanphy came here from Ireland and had 15 children, but only eight lived—and seven of them were girls. “Bryan should have married,” Barbieri says, a tsk in her voice. “But he did die young.” Thus, in its very first generation on this soil, the Mullanphy clan shifted to the girls’ married names—Delaney, Chambers, Clemens, Harney, Biddle, Graham.
Now Mullanphy Street’s been chopped short; the Mullanphy Orphanage sign was stripped from its building; plaques about the Mullanphys keep vanishing. Some days the invisibility makes Barbieri furious; other days she shrugs. “The Mullanphys were humble anyway. In those days you didn’t brag, you just gave your money to the Church.”
John married in 1793 in Ireland. He was fresh from a stint with the elite Irish Brigade in France, and he wanted more for his bride, Elizabeth, than the bleak future Ireland offered at the time. Under the Penal Laws, Catholics could not own land, educate their children, or enter certain professions. When John reached St. Louis, he dipped a cup into the Mississippi River and drank deeply, relieved to be in a country where he could buy and sell property and educate his children.
He’d started in Philadelphia, moved to Baltimore, run a bookstore in Kentucky, and tried to sail schooners to the West Indies. But after the Louisiana Purchase, he felt safe bringing his family to St. Louis, where he already owned land.
During the War of 1812, when cotton prices fell, he bought. A lot. Then he found Andrew Jackson using those bales cotton as bulwarks in the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson convinced John to stay and help fight—who better to defend the cotton? And as soon as he saw the battle ending, he maneuvered a boat to the landing, loaded up the cotton, took it to England and made a king’s ransom.
He came home, looked at his young city, and saw what it needed. “His gold was the foundation capital to open the U.S. Bank in St. Louis,” Barbieri says, “and he gave the money and land for the first hospital, and he opened an orphanage.” He also gave money to educate Jesuit seminarians, and he bankrolled Sr. Rose Philippine Duchesne, exacting in return a promise that her Sacred Heart sisters would educate 20 orphaned or indigent girls each year.
Barbieri winces when John is described as “a tough businessman”; she hates the severity of it. But he was a show-me sort of guy; he wanted to know what someone was going to do with his money. He also respected people’s pride enough to conceal his charity. “He’d tell the baker, ‘Don’t tell anyone I’m giving you this money. Whenever someone comes in who needs help, give them a loaf of bread,’” Barbieri says.
Her fourth cousin, Elise Desloge Tegtmeyer (Desloges are a sturdy branch on the Mullanphy family tree) says, “He was the first millionaire west of the Mississippi. He’d bring Irish people over and help them. It kind of sucks your spirit out of you to be given things and feel dependent, so he would say, ‘I have this property, but I need someone to look after it for me. Would you live here?’ And then he’d come back and say, ‘I have this milk cow that somebody needs to milk every day...’ Nowadays so many people besiege us for money, but that’s how the country was built. You helped each other get a leg up.”
John educated his daughters “until they were so damned smart and self-sufficient that when he gave them their inheritance, he gave it to them in their hand instead of through their husbands,” Barbieri says with satisfaction. He was deeply Catholic, but with “a liberal streak,” she suspects. He gifted his daughter Julia with Taille de Noyer, his hunting lodge, to lure her home, even though her new husband—hushed whisper—wasn’t a Catholic.
Julia’s brother, Bryan, was St. Louis’ third mayor. And he’s one of the few laypeople on the New Cathedral’s mosaic ceiling, because he helped his friend Dr. Moses Linton establish the Society of St. Vincent de Paul here—its first outpost in the U.S. “He would visit hovels and camps trying to give people medical help and food,” says Barbieri. “It was a very unglamorous job for a rich man’s son. But he spoke four languages fluently. See, we can’t fathom people coming off a boat without a dime in their pocket. We can’t fathom the number of immigrants St. Louis saw coming through our city.”
In 1991, Mullanphy descendants threw a party at the Shrine of St. Joseph, built on land donated by the kind and beautiful Anne Mullanphy Biddle. “Her husband was killed in a duel on Bloody Island,” Barbieri says with a sigh. “So stupid. They were both nearsighted, and they got so close to each other, they blew each other up.”
Anne never remarried. She continued her father’s tradition of quiet philanthropy, opening a home for unwed mothers and bringing bread to poor immigrants. When the Visitation nuns were flooded out of their convent in Kaskaskia, Anne turned over her own home to them and gave them land to build a new school.
Earlier, her mother had given money to a different order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, to open a school for the deaf. Today, Barbieri’s daughter Mariquita, a lawyer, serves on the board of the Central Institute for the Deaf. Other Mullanphy descendants work in business, real estate, medicine, and academe. They all keep a low profile. Nobody knows their name.
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