Saint Mary's College — at Its Civic Position

1844 – present

The position, stated plainly: Saint Mary's College is not in South Bend. It stands in the unincorporated Notre Dame CDP, west of the University of Notre Dame, and carries the mailing address Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 — the same civic position the Notre Dame section of this history prints for the university itself. It belongs in this section because its sisters taught in South Bend's schools for a century and its ground adjoins the city; it is printed here at that size, as the city's neighbor, not absorbed into it. The college is a private Catholic women's liberal arts college, founded by the Sisters of the Holy Cross. Four sisters of the congregation arrived at Notre Dame in July 1843 and lived their first two years in the attic of the Log Chapel; told by Indiana's bishop that the state had women religious enough, they opened their school in Michigan: Saint Mary's Academy, opened 16 July 1844 at Bertrand, six miles north, on land donated by Madeline Bertrand, a Potawatomi woman who kept a trading post there with her husband Joseph.

On 15 August 1855, under Mother Angela Gillespie — born Eliza Maria Gillespie, the congregation's American foundress — the academy moved to its present site, the buildings themselves dismantled and carried down, with sixty students; Father Sorin had paid $8,000 for the Rush property, a wooded bluff above the St. Joseph River, to bring them near. Under Mother Pauline O'Neill, directress from 1895 and president for thirty-six years until 1931, the academy became a college in fact: Indiana recognized it as a bachelor degree-granting institution, the first degrees were conferred in 1898, it took the name Saint Mary's College, and it went on to establish the first bachelor's degree program in nursing in Indiana. Sister M. Madeleva Wolff became its president in 1934. Its fourteenth president, Dr. Katie Conboy, has held the office since 2020.

The whole record: the college, the congregation and the ground are told whole in this history’s Saint Mary’s record — the sisters’ arrival in 1843, the Bertrand years, the move to the present ground and what Sorin paid for it, the motherhouse and the Loretto chapel, and the college’s course to the present day. This entry keeps the civic position only, at the size the Schools record needs.