"Lillian-Harris Dean "Pig Foot Mary" (1870-1929)

Entrepreneur in the food service and real estates arenas,was born in the Mississippi Delta.She migrated to New York and became a highly successful
entrepreneur who catered to the culinary tastes of other displaced African-American southerns living in Harlem.She took the name Pig Feet Mary because she turned marketing traditional foods such as pigs' feet,hog maws,
chitterlings (chitlins),and other foods into a thriving business.Through she did not attain the fame or millionaire status of  Madam C.J.Walker,Lillian was an early example of African-American entrepreneurial success in the post-Civil War era.

She began by selling food in 1901 on 60th Street sidewalk out of  a makeshift 
cart- actually,re-purposed baby carriage- at the corner of West 135th Street (Which now Malcolm X Boulevard).In time,she was able to afford a 
steam table booth,which she attached to the corner newsstand -and she married the newsstands owner,John Dean.Her biography is summed up in these two paragraphs by prominent African-American journalist Roi Ottley,
writing in 1943:


...[Most Negroes] earned money the hard way.there was,for instance,Pig Feet 
Mary,huge and deep voiced,who had trained her migrant customers to Harlem Early in the fall of 1901,she drifted into New York from the Mississippi Delta penniless,and within a week after her arrival set up a business in front 
of a San Juan Hill saloon.Mary,whose real name was Lillian Harris,after earning five dollars as a domestic,spent three for a dilapidated baby carriage and a large wash-boiler,and invested the balance in pigs' feet.Hot pigs' feet showed an immediate profit.From early until late at night,swathed in starched checked gingham,she remained at this stand for sixteen years.
Beyond two cotton dresses,her worldly goods were a mounting bank account.
Mary was saving enough money,she often said,to purchase a place for herself 
in an oldfolks' home for respectable colored people.Concern about her old age 
vanished when she moved to Harlem,opened her business at 135th Street on
Lenox Avenue,and three weeks later married John Dean,owner of an adjoining newsstands.

She paid $ 42,000 for a five-story apartment house at the corner of Seventh Avenue and One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street.Later she sold it to the Y.W.C.A. for dormitory purposes.Mary retired in California,where she died.