The Convent Buildings and Grounds

Lourdes Grotto and cemetery, 1944; temporary chapel cornerstone, April 1944; the new convent, 1949-50; St. Francis Cemetery at the grounds' southeast end

The first works: The sisters made the estate a religious landscape in their first two years. The Lourdes Grotto, funded by Anton Solbach, was built in 1944 and blessed within two years of the purchase; a cemetery was completed and the Stations of the Cross erected in 1944, consecrated in the same first period; a Sacred Heart statue was set on the hillside; and a temporary chapel's cornerstone was laid in April 1944. The first burial in the new cemetery was Sister Archangela Petz, in January 1945 — the beginning of the practice that defines the ground to the families who know it: sisters who die in the province's houses are brought back to the motherhouse for burial, and the cemetery at the southeast end of the grounds, St. Francis Cemetery, holds their graves under plain white crosses around a Crucifixion Group with an altar, with a circular Via Dolorosa path among them.

The new convent: The estate's manor was a provincial house, not a convent built for the purpose, and the sisters built. Construction of the new convent began in March 1949; its cornerstone was laid on 26 July 1949; and the jubilee book, going to press before the fact, planned the dedication for 4 October 1950, the seventh anniversary of Bishop Noll's dedication of the provincial house. The terrazzo trade's account of the finished building dates its construction to 1950 and describes floors laid in the lobby, the corridors, the convent chapel and the main chapel, in the tradition of the cathedral at Assisi. The building the trade account describes is the convent that stands at the center of the grounds today, behind the gates, with the main chapel where the perpetual adoration is kept.

The ground as it stands: What a passerby on Dragoon Trail can verify is the edge of it: fenced and gated grounds running south from the road, the convent complex within, the province's offices on the same ground — the corporate offices of the sisters' health system moved onto the provincialate grounds in 1986 and the system's headquarters stands at this address, 1515 West Dragoon Trail, to the present. The interior landscape — grotto, stations, cemetery, chapels — is documented in the congregation's own publications and the diocesan newspaper's reports, and is described here from that public record only. The adoration chapel's public hours, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily, are the ground's one standing open door.

Sources:

1. Commemorating Seventy-five Years, the congregation's 1950 jubilee book (archive.org) — grotto, cemetery, stations, first burial, temporary chapel, new convent dates.
2. The National Terrazzo and Mosaic Association's trade account of the convent's 1950 construction and chapel floors.
3. The congregation's published descriptions of St. Francis Cemetery and the grounds (ssfpa.org).