The Sisters' South Bend Schools

1853–1976, and the succession

The pattern, stated once. For a century the classrooms of Catholic South Bend ran on the three branches of the one congregation planted at Notre Dame in 1841–43 — the priests over the parishes, the brothers over the boys, the sisters over the girls and the little boys — and the parish tellings of those schools live in the religion record of this history, where the buildings, fires, and rebuildings stand.

St. Joseph's, the oldest of them. The line begins in South Bend itself. Father Sorin bought the Lowell lots in 1852 — lots 124 to 126 from Samuel and Catherine Cottrell for $250, on condition a school be built — and a chapel-school of St. Joseph's stood at Hill and LaSalle by 1853; by 1854 the sisters were teaching the girls and little boys in it, the first schoolroom the congregation staffed in the city. The school grew through Assumption Academy, a boarding and day school, into the building of 1886 and the present school of 1926, and the diocese carries it today as the oldest continuously operating school in the city — staffed now entirely by lay teachers, as the diocesan record notes, the lay succession that closed the sisters' century in the parish classrooms.

The parish classrooms. At St. Patrick's, in 1866 a schoolhouse for girls was erected by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, and by the 1890s Blanchard's count gave the parish some 489 pupils taught by Brothers and Sisters of Holy Cross and lay teachers together. At St. Hedwig's the brothers took charge in 1882 and the great brick school of 1884 held, by Blanchard's count, 860 pupils taught by three brothers and five sisters of Holy Cross; Alerding's line, after the fire and rebuild of 1886, gives 735 children taught by sisters of Holy Cross and lay teachers — both counts stand in the religion record with the fire-date conflict, and are not re-litigated here. At St. Mary of the Assumption, the German parish, the school opened in January 1884 and was taught by the Sisters of the Holy Cross from the beginning. Holy Cross Parish and School at 1050 Wilber Street, founded 1929, remains a ministry of the Congregation of Holy Cross; which branch of the family staffed its school in its founding generation is not established in the record, and the gap is printed rather than filled.

Two schools on the sisters' own ground. The motherhouse ran schools of its own. On the campus itself the sisters operated an elementary Campus School from 1951 to 1970 — the building afterward Havican Hall, renovated in 1975 for the reborn nursing program. And the academy — the high school that was the institution's first form — lived its last thirty years inside South Bend's own limits: in 1945 Saint Mary's Academy moved from the campus to the former Erskine estate on the city's south side, Erskine Manor in Twyckenham Hills off Miami Road, the estate of Albert Russel Erskine, president of Studebaker from 1915 to 1933, which the sisters had purchased in the 1940s and converted, its mansion housing students on sixty acres. Sister Cecile Marie Luther, of the first faculty there, supervised the move of 1945 and was in the group that closed the academy thirty years later: the closing announcement was a front-page Tribune story in November 1975, the last class graduated in 1976 with 127 students enrolled at the end, and the sixty acres were afterward developed into housing. The academy's alumnae still gather — the Tribune carried their reunion in May 2026 — but the school itself is gone, and the sisters' South Bend school web survives in the parish schools' walls and in the college on the bluff.

Sources

1. The Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend, parish and school histories — St. Joseph's school and its course, the sisters teaching by 1854, the 1926 building, the oldest-school standing, and the lay staffing of today; Holy Cross Parish (1929) as a continuing ministry of the Congregation.
2. Patrick's girls' schoolhouse of 1866 and Blanchard's 489; St. Hedwig's 860 and Alerding's 735; St. Mary of the Assumption's school of January 1884.
3. South Bend Tribune, 10 May 2026 — the Saint Mary's Academy alumnae reunion account: the 1945 move to the Erskine estate, the November 1975 announcement, the 1976 last class of 127 enrolled, the sixty acres developed into housing.
4. South Bend Tribune, 8 April 1999 (obituary of Sister Cecile Marie Luther), via INGenWeb — the first faculty at Erskine, the supervision of the 1945 move, the closing of 1976.
5. HARC, Archival Reference Guide, building files — Havican Hall and the Campus School it had been.