Folk Figure. She was a Madam in Omaha who was the mistress of Dan Allan (a well-known river boat gambler in and around the Omaha area). After Dan died, she started investing in real estate and amassed a large amount of money. As Anna's life was drawing to a close in 1911, she donated the mansion--land and all--to the City of Omaha for use as an emergency hospital. She asked only $125.00 a month rent until her death. Anna, who was 76-years-old at the time, was said to be worth upwards of a million dollars, and claimed she did not have one relative in the world. When asked about her gift to the city, she said she wanted to help humanity. She made the stipulation in her will that she was to be buried under 9 feet of concrete, so that the "respectable" society women of the town didn't disinter her body from her resting place by her lover, and move it out of Prospect Hill.

(Below: Excerpts from pages 53-55 of the book THE WOMEN WHO BUILT OMAHA by Eileen Wirth, University of Nebraska Press, 2022.)

To her contemporaries, Anna Wilson was "a woman of mystery," according to historian Alfred Sorenson. She is one of the best-known local women of her ara – a key figure in a dark business who left her fortune to charity. 

Accounts of her life differ, but she was likely born in Georgia in 1835, the daughter of a Baptist preacher. An uncle raised her after her parents died. She apparently moved to New Orleans at an unknown date. That's where she met Dan Allen, who persuaded her to come to Omaha in 1867.

"I just happened here," she told the Daily News in 1911. I was roaming at the time and thought Omaha would be a good place." She went to work in Allen's gambling house and became his companion until he died thirteen years later.

By 1886, Wilson had earned enough in "retail services" to open a red brick twenty-five-room mansion with bay windows at Ninth and Douglas. It had forty-six beds and columns of carved naked women on the stone front porch. She would not accept girls new to prostitution into her house. She also paid their medical expenses to combat venereal disease and funeral expenses for those who committed suicide. She encouraged her women to marry and get out of prostitution if they could.

Allen and Wilson lived colorfully and extravagantly. When Allen died in 1884, Wilson marked his grave with an elaborate monument in Prospect Hill Cemetery that she visited and decorated with fresh flowers almost daily. After she left prostitution in the 1890s, she lived quietly in a house at 2018 Wirt Street and invested in real estate deals that made up about half of her fortune. She also gave generously to charities.

Her offer of her old brothel to the city was controversial, but the city rented it from her for $125 a month for use as a hospital and took ownership of the building in 1911, after Wilson died. The city was quick to remove the naked women columns from the front porch, replacing them with more respectable plain wood columns. Eventually, the hospital became a venereal disease clinic.

At the same time that Wilson offered her house to the city, she also announced her plan to spread her fortune among Omaha charities because she was seventy-six, had no heirs, and had only months to live. 

Many modern downtown landmarks – including TD Ameritrade Park, Lewis & Clark Landing, CHI Health Center, and the Bob Kerry Pedestrian Bride – are located on or near Wilson's old properties.