Undated photo of Ford Tower during construction (circa 1928). Photograph: Courtesy John J. Burns Library Archive

In 1925, all of 12 years after making the move from urban Boston to Chestnut Hill, Boston College was experiencing harsh growing pains. Its cornerstone Tower Building (later named Gasson Hall) had been completed in 1913, soon after joined by St. Mary’s Hall as a home for the Jesuit community and by a Science Building (Devlin Hall). Owing to a lack of funds, however, the construction of a fourth building—a library later named for the University’s first president, John Bapst, SJ—had been halted; a temporary flat roof sheltered its lower floors.

A year later, following a fundraising campaign, construction resumed, and the building was completed in 1928. A pamphlet published in conjunction with the campaign listed the rather formidable prices that would earn the dedication of particular library features, from stained-glass windows ($800–$3,500, or in today’s dollars $10,800–$47,400) to offices and other rooms ($5,000–$50,000) to the arched central reading room ($100,000). Today, a variety of dedicatory plaques from those early years can be found throughout the building, the grandest of which is a bronze example that hangs just inside the entrance to the fourth-floor reading room and declares:

THIS HALL
SACRED TO THE READING OF THE BOOK
IS PLACED IN TRIBUTE TO
THOMAS J. GARGAN
SCHOLAR, JURIST, ORATOR
AN EXEMPLAR TO THE STUDENT
AN ORNAMENT TO THE LAW
AN INSPIRATION TO MEN

But there is one place—and a rather grand place, listed at $40,000 in the donor brochure—that offers no plaque in recognition of its donor. That is the library’s gothic tower. A 1933 booklet by librarian William M. Stinson, SJ, identified the structure as the Margaret Elizabeth Ford Memorial Tower, but revealed nothing more. Thirty years later, a brief history published by the student yearbook staff described the tower as being named for “Mrs. Elizabeth Ford, a washerwoman.” No citations were attached, nor an explanation of how a washerwoman put together the funds required to give her name to the tower. Still, it was a good story, and it has survived, orally and in print (including in this magazine).

Miss Margaret Elizabeth Ford (for that was her real name, and she was never married) first entered Boston College history via a gift ledger kept by President Thomas I. Gasson, SJ, who in 1908 noted a $10 donation from her in aid of purchasing the Chestnut Hill property. She doesn’t appear again until August 27, 1926, when she is mentioned in a letter to President James H. Dolan, SJ. The letter was written by another Margaret Ford, a Brighton resident, “concerning the will of my cousin, the late Margaret Elizabeth Ford”:

Rev. Dear Sir,
I am writing to you, as you requested me to write to you, to remind you that you would put my suggestion to you concerning my cousin, the late Margaret Elizabeth Ford, before the Trustees of Boston College when they meet in September 1926, and I hope you will have some encouraging reply for me after the meeting.
Very Respectfully,

Ford’s name does not appear in the board’s minutes for that meeting, nor is there any record of a reply from Dolan. And that’s where the Boston College archives trail goes dead cold.

But other archives exist and reveal that the mysterious Miss Ford was born in 1840 to Irish immigrant parents in the town of St. George, New Brunswick, Canada. She was the eldest of four children of John and Elizabeth Ford. By the 1860s, the family had emigrated to the factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, where Margaret and her sisters worked in a cotton mill. Following the deaths of her brother and father in 1882 and 1883, respectively, Margaret moved to Boston, where she boarded on Harrison Avenue—not far from Boston College’s first home—and worked in the growing city’s bustling downtown as a milliner, or hat maker.

Ford had plenty of company in the millinery business in Boston. At one time, there were 18 milliners with “rooms” at her street address. Women wore hats at the turn of the 20th century, and before mass-produced hats were readily available, women of a certain class bought their hats in “rooms” like Ford’s, where they were designed, produced, and sold. Ambitious, industrious, independent women—such as Ford—could build careers as milliners, who stood a rung above seamstresses in status and range of skills. According to historian Wendy Gamber in her 1997 book The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860–1930, seamstresses of that era “stitched together precut versions of men’s shirts and pants,” while milliners (and dressmakers) “designed and crafted individual garments for exacting customers.” Milliners typically worked their way up through several levels of skill and responsibility, ending—if they were patient, smart, and hardworking enough—as owners of their own shops.

Ford was eminently successful, becoming head trimmer for Eliza Libby, owner of a downtown Boston hat-making firm, in 1867. When Libby died in 1885, Ford applied for credit and, at the age of 45, went into business under her own name on Tremont Street. In February 1885, R.G. Dun & Company, a credit reporting agency, noted that she was “fitting up a room and will do a nice parlor millinery business. Was head trimmer for Miss E.A. Libby for 18 yrs. Has good taste, is capable, and has a good acquaintance. She states that she has means of her own and can pay cash if she wanted to, but shall ask for 30 days as a matter of convenience. Although we find no one willing to estimate her worth they say she saved money every year from her salary and the impression is that she has a little property and it is not supposed she will carry much stock. The Boston trade express confidence in her, and will give her credit.” Three brief updates followed, the last stating that Ford was “doing a thrifty business and although no one appears to have any definite knowledge about her means she is sold her wants[,] pays well[,] and they call her credit good.”

Boston directories of the 1880s and 1890s list Ford’s shop, and an advertisement in concert programs of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1898 informed concertgoers that “Miss M.E. Ford . . . has opened her rooms with a choice assortment of Fall and Winter Goods. Personal attention given to mourning. Take elevator.”

While conducting her business, Ford would have commuted from the home she purchased in 1900 at 136 Newbury Street (now site of the School of Fashion Design) in Boston’s Back Bay. She lived there with her sisters, whom she employed, and her mother. In 1913 Ford closed the downtown shop, but remained in business at her home. Her sisters died within a month of each other in the spring of 1917. Ford continued to live at the Back Bay property until her death in 1926. As the years advanced, she took in boarders, seeming to have let go her business. If Boston College knew her late in her life, this may account for the reference to her being a domestic servant or washerwoman, rather than business owner.

Whatever else she was over the course of her long life (she died at age 87), Miss Margaret Elizabeth Ford was a shrewd businesswoman. Her estate at her death totaled more than $125,500, equal to nearly $1.7 million today. Her assets, according to a will signed on April 9, 1925, included her Newbury Street home, valued at $50,000, along with bank accounts totaling more than $16,000, personal belongings valued at $1,000, and stocks—mainly in railways, electric railways or trolleys, and power companies—worth about $50,000. Ford died at home of pneumonia (of six days duration) and “senility,” a term often used in death certificates of that time as a synonym for old age. The fact that no duration of senility was recorded in Ford’s case seems to support this interpretation.

In addition to modest bequests to her lawyer, a cousin, and a handful of friends, Ford left money to family members of Juliette Billings, a kindergarten teacher living in Jamaica Plain, whose family had been near neighbors of Ford’s family in Canada. Ford also made bequests in honor of her sisters to a nursing home for the destitute elderly run by the Little Sisters of the Poor in Roxbury and to the Working Boys Home in Newton Highlands—a school for orphaned and homeless boys operated by the Xaverian Brothers—and also to the Holy Ghost Hospital for Incurables in Cambridge, which specialized in care for sufferers of cancer, tuberculosis, and other terminal conditions and was run by the Sisters of Charity of Montreal. Ford’s sister Mary died at age 70 of ovarian cancer. The death record states that she died at home, but perhaps she was treated at Holy Ghost Hospital.

Boston College was mentioned twice in the will that Ford signed in 1925. In the first instance, near the beginning of the document, Ford assigned $2,000 to Fr. Gasson (more than a decade after his presidency) to be “devoted to such use and purposes of Boston College as [he] shall determine”; the second reference, near the end and just above her large slanting signature, stated “All the rest . . . to the Trustees of Boston College, for the general purposes of the College.” Since the sum of her other bequests totaled $16,500, this would seem to have provided Boston College with a gift of more than $100,000, probably making Miss Ford one of the most generous benefactors of Boston College from the time of its founding into the middle of the 20th century.

In a list, likely composed in 1928, of “Inscriptions for Memorial Tablets in the Boston College Library,” Fr. Dolan mentioned seven plaques. The fifth was one reading “The Margaret Elizabeth Ford Memorial Tower,” to be placed “In the Library Tower.” If such a sign was struck and affixed, it isn’t in the Ford Tower today, nor is it recalled by individuals who have known Boston College and the library over many decades.

In a ceremony to be led by University President William P. Leahy, SJ, Boston College will install a dedicatory plaque in Ford Tower in fall 2016, meeting an obligation nearly 90 years old.

Shelley Barber is a reference and archives specialist at the Burns Library.