John McDonogh: The Miser Who Left Millions to Educate New Orleans' Children

The Miser Who Left Millions to Educate New Orleans' Children

John McDonogh was born in 1779 in Baltimore, Maryland, and arrived in New Orleans as a young man around 1800, drawn by the commercial explosion that followed the Louisiana Purchase. He built a fortune in real estate, shipping, and plantation agriculture — amassing what was reportedly the largest private land holdings in America by the time of his death. His properties surrounded New Orleans and stretched across southeast Louisiana. He was, by any measure, one of the wealthiest men in the antebellum South.

He was also, by all accounts, a miser. He worked obsessively, lived frugally, and socialized rarely. His neighbors considered him eccentric at best and insufferable at worst. He died in 1850 with few friends and fewer admirers. Then they read his will.

The Will That Built a School System

McDonogh left nearly two million dollars — an astronomical sum in 1850 — to the cities of Baltimore and New Orleans, specifically earmarked for the public education of poor children, including formerly enslaved children. The bequest was so large and so unexpected that his heirs challenged it all the way to the Supreme Court, delaying distribution until 1858. But when the money finally arrived, it transformed New Orleans education.

By the 1970s, approximately twenty schools in New Orleans carried the McDonogh name. Generations of children — Black and white, rich and poor — attended McDonogh schools across the city. McDonogh 35 became the first public high school for Black students in New Orleans and a cornerstone of the city's Black educational tradition.

A Complicated Legacy

McDonogh was a slaveholder. He devised a system allowing enslaved people to purchase their own freedom over approximately fifteen years — progressive for the era, but still built on the fundamental evil of human bondage. He supported the American Colonization Society, which advocated sending freed Black Americans to Liberia. Many of the schools bearing his name have since been renamed as the city reckons with its complicated past.

John McDonogh was a man of deep contradictions: a slaveholder who funded schools for Black children, a miser who gave away his fortune, a recluse whose legacy shaped the lives of hundreds of thousands. New Orleans has always been a place where good and evil coexist in the same story, and McDonogh's story is one of the most complicated the city has ever told.