Mother Margaret Mary Healy Murphy

Mrs. Murphy's hospital is the part of her story the marker skips. After the 1875 hurricane she and three friends bought a center for the homeless that people came to call Mrs. Murphy's Hospital for the Poor, open to all regardless of creed or color. She had nursed yellow fever victims and adopted three daughters, one a homeless girl named Delphine. A sermon turned her toward Black Texans, and the San Antonio church, convent and school she built met prejudice and a shortage of teachers, so she founded a congregation of sisters, the first such community formed in Texas.

What the plaque says

Mother Margaret Mary Healy Murphy Born in Cahersiveen, County Kerry, Ireland, on May 4, 1833, Margaret Mary Healy immigrated to the United States in 1845 with her physician father, Richard Healy. After staying with her brothers, uncles and aunts, they made their way to Matamoros by way of New Orleans. Her father passed away upon reaching New Orleans. In Matamoros, the family owned and operated a hotel. During this time, Margaret met and married John Bernard Murphy in 1849. The couple moved to Corpus Christi, where Murphy studied law, began his political career and later became mayor (1880 - 1884). Through the years, Margaret Mary helped the sick during the yellow fever epidemic and later opened three separate hospitals. The couple helped bring the Sisters of St. Mary Namur from New York to Texas where the sisters opened the state's first Catholic boarding school. After John Bernard's death in 1884, Margaret Mary purchased Echo Ranch from her brother-in-law, Patrick Murphy, and esrablished St. Stephen Chapel to serve the local population. She then moved to San Antonio where in 1888 she built a free school and St. Peter Claver Church for African Americans. To help find enough teachers to support the school, Margaret Mary decided to start her own congregation of sisters formed in the religious life with the Sisters of St. Mary Namur. She became mother superior for the Sisters of the Holy Ghost, now known as Sisters of the Holy Spirit and Mary Immaculate. She recruited young women from Ireland to become members of the congregation. After spending her life healing people and educating the poor, Margaret Mary died on August 25, 2907, and is buried along with her husband, John Bernard Murphy, in Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery. (2018)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.3 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.9 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.1 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.3 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• John Bernard Murphy — steps away
• Site of the Corpus Christi Lighthouse — steps away
• Lone Star Fair — steps away
• The Corpus Christi Caller-Times — steps away