Verna Laboy will bring African-American millionaire Annie Fisher to life at the free monthly CoMo Preservation meeting on Tuesday, April 23rd in the Friends Room at the Columbia Public Library.

Don’t know who Annie Fisher is?

Mrs. Fisher was born in 1867, the child of formerly enslaved parents. She was a successful CoMo African-American entrepreneur whose estate was valued at nearly $100,000 before her 1938 death at 71, according to a May 20, 2015 Columbia Daily Tribune article. Today, her holdings would be worth $2 million, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor of Statistics’ inflation calculator.

Annie Fisher made her fortune through catering, making beaten biscuits she sold throughout the nation, and real estate. 

How does honoring Beaten Biscuits and Annie Fisher’s business acumen dovetail with CoMo Preservation?

CoMo Preservation is a not-for-profit, charitable organization committed to preserving the spaces and places important to Columbia’s rich history.

 Mrs. Fisher’s story nearly faded from history because neither of her mansions survived. Both of Annie Fisher’s mansions, one a 14-room brick house at 608 Park Avenue and the other The Wayside Inn, a restaurant/mansion at 2911 Old Hwy 63, were demolished. Without these important and impressive homes, reminders of Annie Fisher as a historical figure and an against-all-odds successful entrepreneur were erased.

Her stately Park Avenue mansion and The Wayside Inn were in addition to a portfolio of 18 rental properties Fisher accumulated during her lifetime, several of which still exist.

Without a building to mark Mrs. Fisher’s story, Verna Laboy is determined to keep her story alive through her historic impersonation of Annie Fisher.

Laboy moved to Columbia in 1989 but didn’t learn about Mrs. Fisher until the 1990s, when the Boone County Historical Society named Fisher to the Hall of Fame. 

Laboy dove into finding out about Fisher and began to impersonate the historic figure. Laboy says the story of Fisher is crucial to Columbia, adding people have to see themselves in the information, in history, to value themselves.

Laboy works as a program manager for the Boone County Community Services Department. Previously she worked for Columbia/Boone County Public Health & Human Services.

In 2015, she founded the Worley Street Roundtable, a community organization dedicated to helping connect people and organizations within the public school system to help children succeed.


All CoMo Preservation’s monthly meetings feature a guest speaker on historic preservation and/or historic properties in Columbia, Missouri, and open to the public and held in the Friends Room at the Columbia Public Library.