/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/e0/0b/e00b3b75-e122-4207-a4fa-6953af63f630/madam-henry.jpg "The Formerly Enslaved Black Bordello Queen Who Built a Notorious Business Empire | History")
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In the fall of 1895, Madam Priscilla Henry lay on her deathbed in one of the lavish bordellos that she’d used to entertain patrons for decades. The premier lady of sex work in Victorian St. Louis had built an empire estimated to be worth at least $100,000—the equivalent of about $3.7 million today—but she seemed remorseful over her dealings and fate as her health waned. “She was often heard to remark that her sufferings were a heavenly visitation sent upon her as a punishment for her sinful life,” the *St. Louis Post-Dispatch* reported.
Plenty of people in the Missouri city agreed with Henry’s own harsh assessment. “Wicked, Notorious, Old Priscilla Henry Is Dead,” chastised the supremely blunt headline in the *Post-Dispatch*, decrying the madam’s career as “Pandering to Depraved Passions.” Yet the 76-year-old Henry had her defenders, too. She rubbed shoulders with some of the most prominent people in St. Louis, and the vitriol that met her death was balanced by outpourings of praise. Even the *Post-Dispatch*, which branded her “the wickedest wench in St. Louis,” had to admit that “the deceased was one of the most remarkable women of her class that ever lived” in the city.
The end of Henry’s life stood in stark contrast to how it began. The woman who successfully set up a business empire, collecting wealth and property by captivating men from across social classes, began life enslaved, with not even freedom to her name. She ended it not only as an infamous bordello madam who outsmarted a long line of competitors and connivers who sought to bring her down. She also did an extremely rare thing in American history: She used the fortune she’d amassed to buy the very Alabama-based plantation where she was born, enslaved and raised. But danger seemed to follow Henry everywhere she went, and she would ultimately pay a high price for her remarkable success.
### The making of Madam Henry
Henry migrated to St. Louis from Alabama in the 1860s. The full-figured woman with a commanding presence was the eldest of six children. She spent the first 46 years of her life near the city of Florence, Alabama, on the Forks of Cypress Plantation owned by slaveholder James Jackson Jr., who initially refused to free the individuals he’d enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Once she was finally granted news of her freedom, Henry traveled north to “Mound City”—as St. Louis was known—by flat boat, where she had brief stints working as a maid and a washerwoman.
But Henry quickly discovered one of city life’s timeless dirty secrets: Sex sells. The Social Evil Hospital was founded in 1873 as part of the Social Evil Ordinance, which legalized and regulated sex work in the city. After the ordinance was repealed, the hospital opened to treat poor women and children in the city. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis
As in other river towns, particularly Kansas City and Memphis, the escort industry in St. Louis capitalized off travelers whose business took them down the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. The Gateway to the West became a hotbed for prostitution in the late 19th century, so much so that it was one of the first cities in America to temporarily legalize the business. […]