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1820 – 1966
The ground first: Holy Cross College is the youngest of the three schools at Notre Dame, but the family that founded it is the oldest presence on the ground. The teaching brotherhood behind it began in France in 1820, when the parish priest Jacques-François Dujarié gathered young men at Ruillé-sur-Loir to teach in parish schools that had no teachers; they were called the Brothers of Saint Joseph. In 1835 the aging Dujarié handed his brothers to Basil Moreau, a Le Mans priest with his own band of auxiliary priests, and in 1837 the two societies joined as one congregation named for Sainte-Croix, the Le Mans neighborhood where Moreau's community stood. That joining is the root fact of everything at Notre Dame: one congregation, in time three separate branches — priests, brothers, and sisters — and eventually three separate schools on adjoining ground.
The brothers reached Indiana before either neighboring school existed. The college's own catalog records that the Brothers of Holy Cross arrived in the United States in 1841, the first community of teaching brothers to make a permanent foundation in the country, sent to serve the Diocese of Vincennes. In November 1842 Edward Sorin and a party of brothers reached the lakes in northern Indiana and founded Notre Dame du Lac. A 1906 account in the university's student magazine, printed while men who remembered the founding generation still lived, credits the brothers with cutting the first path through the forest to the south shore of Saint Mary's Lake and raising the first dwelling house on its frozen edge. Through the university's first century the brothers were its working half as much as its teaching half: they taught, farmed its land, ran its trades and its post office, and formed their own young men on its campus.
That formation had an address. In 1906 the brothers' house of studies at Notre Dame took the name of their first founder: Dujarié. The name was used first for the renovated Old College building — Sorin's original 1843 college building, formally opened as the brothers' house of studies on 19 March 1906 — and then for the brothers' own scholasticate building raised the same year beside Saint Mary's Lake, where young brothers who had taken first vows lived, studied as Notre Dame students, and prepared for final vows. The Dujarié scholasticate housed brothers for sixty years; Saint André Bessette, the Montreal brother later canonized, lodged in it briefly in 1920 and 1927. It is not a Holy Cross College building, and never was: in 1966 the university bought it from the brothers and renamed it Carroll Hall. The year matters — the brothers left their old house of studies on the university's ground in the same year they opened a college of their own across the road.
Two other Holy Cross houses frame the college's ground, and the record must not merge them into it. Moreau Seminary, the major seminary of the congregation's priests, stands on the university's campus by Saint Joseph's Lake, north of the college. Ground was broken for it on 13 May 1957; its first residents moved in in 1958 and it was completed in 1959, built for up to two hundred seminarians and named for Basil Moreau. It belongs to the priests' province and the university's story, not to the Brothers' college; its place here is geography. The second house is Dujarié House, on the college's own ground in Holy Cross Village: the Brothers' infirmary, a skilled nursing house where retired and ailing brothers live and die, documented in brother after brother's obituary from the early 2000s onward, beside Schubert Villa, the brothers' assisted-living house. Dujarié the scholasticate and Dujarié the infirmary are two different houses bearing one founder's name.
Why the brothers could found a college separately at all is a 1945 fact: that year the congregation's brothers and priests separated at the provincial level while keeping one general administration. By the 1960s the Midwest Province of the Brothers was its own corporation, distinct from the province that conducted the university. In the summer of 1964 the Midwest Province's chapter took up the development of a parcel the province held on the far side of the road from the university, to make a center for the Brothers and a two-year college for student brothers. The college, the provincial center, a brothers' cemetery, and in time a retirement village all stand on this one Brothers' holding. How the province first acquired the parcel — by what purchase, from whom, and when — the open record read does not say; that deed history waits in the province's archives and the county's deed books, and is printed here as a gap rather than filled from the neighbors' land history, which is a different record.
Sources:
- Holy Cross College Academic Catalog 2024–2025, history and location — the Brothers' 1841 arrival, their part in founding Notre Dame in 1842, operation by the Midwest Province.
- Catholic Encyclopedia entry on the Congregation of Holy Cross (1913, public domain) — Dujarié's 1820 founding of the Brothers of Saint Joseph and the Dujarié Institute at Notre Dame.
- University of Notre Dame, Carroll Hall history page — the 1906 Dujarie Institute, Bessette's 1920 and 1927 stays, the university's 1966 purchase and renaming.
- Notre Dame Archives, Brother Aidan's Extracts and the 31 March 1906 Scholastic — Dujarie Hall's 19 March 1906 opening and the brothers as first builders on Saint Mary's Lake.
- Notre Dame Magazine (2025) on the Moreau Seminary renovation, and the university archives' May 1957 press release — ground broken 13 May 1957, first residents 1958, completion 1959.
- Brothers of Holy Cross, Midwest Province newsletter, March 2015, and midweek sheet, August 2013 — the 1964 chapter and parcel, the 1966 first building, brothers buried in Saint Joseph Cemetery on the grounds since 1966.
- Brother obituaries in the South Bend Tribune, 2003–2010, and the Indiana Tax Court's 2007 Brothers of Holy Cross decision — Dujarie House as the brothers' infirmary in Holy Cross Village, Schubert Villa, and the Brothers' corporation as village owner.
- Engaging Aging, Winter 2022 — the 1945 provincial separation of brothers and priests and the rise of Holy Cross Village.