The women of the record: the sisters of Saint Mary's go to the war

1861 – 1865 · Clay Township ground, west of the present CDP line

The service: the largest body of war service ever to go out from either township was not a company of men. The motherhouse of the Sisters of the Holy Cross stood at Saint Mary's, in Clay Township — Howard states the seat plainly: the University of Notre Dame and St. Mary's Academy are "situated in Clay township, St. Joseph county" — west of the strip of Clay that the present census-designated place covers, so that the ground is this section's township but not its CDP, and the boundary is printed here once and held. In October 1861 Governor Oliver P. Morton, having seen the neglect in Indiana's camps and hospitals, wrote to Father Sorin asking for sisters. The request came on 21 October; the next day Mother Angela Gillespie and six sisters left for Cairo, Illinois, where General Grant assigned them to the military hospital at Paducah, Kentucky. A second party under Mother Angela herself took the naval hospital at Mound City, Illinois, and stayed to 1865. In 1862 the sisters boarded the USS Red Rover, the Navy's first hospital ship, on the Mississippi — for which the Navy has acknowledged them as the forerunners of the Navy Nurse Corps and its first women employees — and they staffed hospitals besides in Memphis, St. Louis and Washington.

The count, in its conflict, printed whole: how many sisters served is a documented disagreement, and this section prints it as one. The Indiana Historical Bureau's marker (71.1965.1, "Sisters of the Holy Cross, Civil War Nurses, 1861–1865") says eighty sisters under Mother Angela; Ellen Ryan Jolly's Nuns of the Battlefield says more than eighty; the War Department's own record, as the Bureau's marker-review report notes, recorded sixty-three; and the congregation's own accounts say sixty-five of the hundred and sixty sisters then in the United States. The four figures stand in the record together; the service is not in dispute, only its arithmetic. The marker's own travels — dedicated in South Bend on 31 October 1965 and moved in 2013 to the hospital campus in Mishawaka — are Mishawaka's print, cross-referenced; the nursing itself began on this section's township ground, and the course is carried here at that strength.

The later wars, at roll strength: no woman of Clay or Harris township is named in any later roll reached — not in the Gold Star volume's county entries (the county's named nurse of the First World War, Gladys Nancy Lyon, is South Bend's), not in the county veterans index under a Granger attribution, not in the federal casualty files. The negative is printed at that strength: the women of these townships served in the century's wars as surely as their neighbors did, but the rolls that name women name them by city, and no township carrier was found. The settling sources are the same pair that govern the men's twentieth-century record: the library's index to the Tribune's Service Notes column and the services' own records.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau — marker 71.1965.1 and its Marker Text Review Report (17 June 2013): the eighty of the marker text; the War Department's sixty-three; the hospitals served.
2. Sisters of the Holy Cross accounts, carried in Today's Catholic (2011; updated 2017) — Morton's call of 21 October 1861, the first party's departure, the Red Rover, "65 of the 160 Sisters."
3. Howard (1907), vol. 1, ch. XII — Saint Mary's situated in Clay township.
4. U.S. Navy, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, The Grog Ration (2008) — the Red Rover service and the Navy's acknowledgment.