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The Carlisle estate purchased June 1943; possession 2 October 1943; provincial house dedicated by Bishop Noll, 4 October 1943
The purchase: In June 1943 the eastern province of the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration bought the estate the record calls Carlisle — 400 acres on Dragoon Trail, at the southern edge of Mishawaka, with a 25-room manor house. Bishop John Francis Noll of Fort Wayne, whose diocese then took in Mishawaka, urged the purchase and called the estate a "find in a million," in the words the sisters' own Mount Alverno timeline preserves. The estate was named Mount Alverno, for the Tuscan mountain where St. Francis received the stigmata. One spelling conflict stands in the sisters' own record and is printed as it stands: the Mount Alverno timeline's caption calls the house the "Carlile Mansion," while the congregation's 1950 jubilee book writes "Carlisle estate."
The taking of possession: The sisters took possession of Mount Alverno on 2 October 1943, and Bishop Noll dedicated the house as the province's provincial house on 4 October 1943, the feast of St. Francis. The move was a provincial house's move, not a new foundation's: the province brought its administration, its novitiate and postulancy, and its retired and infirm sisters to this ground, and the house took on the motherhouse's full round of functions — formation of new sisters, the province's government, a retirement home for aged and infirm sisters, and the community's annual retreats. A rectory for the house's chaplains stands on the grounds. The gated ground that stands behind its fences on Dragoon Trail today is this estate: the manor and convent complex at its heart, the chapel, the grotto, and the sisters' cemetery at its southeast end, described from the public record in the grounds entry below.
Why Mishawaka: The record gives the move plainly rather than romantically. The province's center of gravity had shifted east and north — its works ran through Indiana and the eastern states — and the Lafayette house was a hospital complex in a city neighborhood, not a formation and retirement ground. The Carlisle estate gave the province 400 acres of quiet at the edge of a growing city, room for a novitiate, a cemetery of its own, and building ground for the convent the sisters would raise within the decade. Bishop Noll's enthusiasm, preserved in his "find in a million," was the diocese's welcome; the diocese gained, on its northern edge, a motherhouse whose sisters already staffed its schools and hospitals.
Sources:
- The sisters' Mount Alverno timeline, reproduced by the South Bend Area Genealogical Society (sbags.org).
- Commemorating Seventy-five Years, the congregation's 1950 jubilee book (archive.org).
- The congregation's published history and house pages (ssfpa.org).