Bertrand: The First Motherhouse, 1844–1855

1844–1855

A rented five-room house. The congregation's annals describe the first home exactly: a small frame building of five rooms — living room, classroom, and kitchen-refectory below, dormitory and novitiate community room above — rented from Mr. Bertrand, in the village Joseph and Madeline Bertrand's trading post had named. The college's history carries the ground differently, as land and a small building donated by Madeline Bertrand, the Potawatomi woman who kept the post with her husband; the two tellings stand as the record carries them. On 16 July 1844 Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart and four postulants took up their abode there, and the academy opened. On 8 September 1844, in the little village church, Father Sorin gave the habit to the first American Sisters of the Holy Cross: Sister Mary of the Nativity (Elizabeth Daily), Sister Mary of the Holy Cross (Mary Sweeney), and Sister Mary of Mt. Carmel (Mary Dougherty). Three more sisters came from France that October, and on 8 December 1844 the first professions in this country were pronounced, in the chapel of the brothers' novitiate at Notre Dame.

The work and the poverty. The annals are plain about the first year's economy. The sisters taught a few children of the neighborhood, cared for several orphans, and did the laundry of the students of Notre Dame, the St. Joseph River serving, in the annals' phrase, not only as reservoir but as rinsing tub. Money was an unknown commodity; staple provisions came from Notre Dame, which did not always find them easy to procure, and the annals instance breakfasts delayed because the bread arrived frozen hard, and meals without meat because bad roads stopped travel between Bertrand and Notre Dame. The French sisters had no English; the English-speaking novices and the professors from Notre Dame taught them. The poverty reached the habit itself: the annals preserve a young sister's diary note of going to the novitiate room — which was also the clothes room — and finding Miss Nail sorting pieces of different materials and shades of black with which to make the habits; one sister's habit was a combination of cloth, merino, and alpaca. The habit of those years was black serge with a blue worsted belt, the chaplet of the Seven Dolors, and the silver heart that remains the insignia of profession; the cap and collar now worn were finally adopted at an investiture in March 1853. Public opinion turned as the work showed: the Catholic Miscellany's February 1846 account of a reception at Bertrand noted that fifteen months earlier spectators had looked on the young sisters as dupes of priestcraft and superstition, and that curiosity had since given place to inquiry. By the close of 1845 the community numbered fourteen.

Seventy-seven acres, given. In 1845 the inhabitants of Bertrand donated seventy-seven acres to the sisters, and a grant of five thousand francs from the Society of the Propagation of the Faith let them build: a two-story frame building twenty by forty feet, with a one-story kitchen addition, finished in the spring of 1846 and named Our Lady of the Seven Dolors. A blacksmith's shop bought for five dollars was joined to the convent as a parlor for Father Sorin's visits — a five-dollar building with a long afterlife, told below. The sisters opened a school for Indian children at Pokagon, Michigan, in 1845, and the novitiate was opened at Bertrand under Detroit's sanction. Superios changed often in the little community's first years — Mother Cenacle, who died at Fort Wayne, where she had gone to consult a physician and where the Sisters of Providence took her in, among them — until Mother Mary du Sauveur was brought from Canada in July 1849 and, in the annals' words, the Academy began to fly with its own wings: wings of forty feet each on a building of ninety-two feet frontage, a roll of fifty boarders by 1850, and a printed prospectus — board and tuition thirty-five dollars per session of five months — directing pupils to the daily stage line from Niles to South Bend that passed through Bertrand. In January 1851 the State of Michigan recognized St. Mary's and granted its charter, and a Sodality of the Children of Mary was formally established at Bertrand in May 1852.

The ground shifts. In 1854 the novitiate was moved from Bertrand to Notre Dame, and during the first retreat in the new convent an epidemic the annals identify as cholera broke out at Notre Dame, claiming, in their words, one after another among the religious — priests, brothers, and sisters — while the spared wore themselves out nursing the sick and burying the dead. That February Sister Angela Gillespie returned from France to take charge of the academy at Bertrand, and under her the standard of the school rose past expectation. But the annals record a standing insecurity: the sentiments of the Bishop of Detroit were not settled in the sisters' favor, and Sorin had already invested in property at Mishawaka with the sisters in view. A school there, Holy Angels Academy under Sister Euphrosine, drew few pupils — the annals name the Know-Nothing prejudice of the day as the cause — and the orphans from Bertrand and the pupils of the Industrial School were lodged at Mishawaka until May 1855. The Bertrand foundation had succeeded as a school and failed as a seat: it stood in another state's diocese, on a bishop's revocable goodwill, eleven miles from the community it served. The move, when it came, solved the land question outright — by purchase.

Sources

1. A Story of Fifty Years (1905), "The Sisters at Bertrand" and "Development of Community at Bertrand" — the five-room rented house, the receptions of 8 September and 8 December 1844, the laundry, the provisions, the fourteen sisters, the seventy-seven acres and the five thousand francs, Our Lady of the Seven Dolors, the five-dollar blacksmith's shop, Mother du Sauveur, the 1850 prospectus, the Michigan charter of January 1851, the 1854 cholera, Holy Angels Academy at Mishawaka.
2. Saint Mary's College, published history of Saint Mary's Academy (college site) — the land and small building donated by Madeline Bertrand, as the college carries it.
3. Catholic Encyclopedia, "Sisters of the Holy Cross" — the 1845 land gift, the Propagation of the Faith grant, and the school for Indians at Pokagon, 1845.
4. Heritage and Research Center (HARC), Archival Reference Guide to the Records of the Sisters of the Holy Cross — the Bertrand cottage among the motherhouse building files.