The Early College Whole — Charter to Civil War

1844–1865 · structure, enrollment and fire

What the charter actually created. The act of 15 January 1844, whose text and passage stand in the base fragment, incorporated a university in law a full generation before the institution resembled one in fact. The academic history written by Father Philip S. Moore for the university's own Archives states the founding structure plainly: in its inception Notre Dame was comparable to the French collège or lycée rather than to the American college. The first printed catalogue's scheme, for 1854–55, made the collegiate course six years long and folded two preparatory years inside it, because the boys who came were, in Moore's reading of Sorin's own letters of 1850 and 1851, in their early teens or younger, and most were enrolled in the preparatory courses and the commercial course. The distinction the later university takes for granted — preparatory school below, college above — did not exist at the start; there was one ladder, climbed from the rudiments. Around and beneath the ladder stood the institution's other schools: the Manual Labor School, chartered the same year as the university, teaching carpenter's, cabinet, blacksmith's, shoemaker's, tailor's, bricklaying, gardening and farming trades beside an English education; the novitiate of the Congregation of Holy Cross, raised on the island between the lakes and blessed with its chapel on 8 December 1844, which the bishop's contract of donation had required within the same term as the college; and the theological students, who by 1850 — six years after the charter — already made up about a fifth of the student body in the Catholic Encyclopedia's accounting.

The three tiers named. The structure that the catalogues eventually printed had three tiers, and their dates of separation are the early college's real chronology. The Minims — the youngest boys, under twelve — were there from the beginning: the prospectus tradition of St. Edward's Hall records that the first pupil was a Minim, and assigns the distinction to Alexis Coquillard of South Bend. The first move to make the Minim department separate came in 1854. The Minims were at first in the charge of lay teachers, principally women — the prospectus names Miss McCambray first, then Miss Birch, Miss Blake and Mrs. Stace — and in 1863 Sorin transferred the department to the Sisters of the Holy Cross under Mother Angela Gillespie, the arrangement that lasted. The preparatory department proper fed boys to the collegiate course, which was at first a small top on a large base. A two-year commercial course, added in 1862 and pitched, in Moore's judgment, at about the level of the third and fourth years of an American high school, completed the scheme: except for that addition, the structure remained essentially the six-year collegiate course leading to the Bachelor of Arts through the whole period of this article.

Enrollment, counted honestly. The Archives' own account of the early years gives the scale without varnish: for the first few academic years enrollment hovered around thirty students, most of them preparatory, only a select few at the collegiate level, and the body was highly transient — barely half returned the following term. Sorin's first scheme had followed the French model the brothers knew; the students in fact took the English course — bookkeeping and business skills — as the pragmatic choice, and the curriculum settled only slowly through the late 1840s and early 1850s. The Catholic Encyclopedia's figures give the climb: sixty-nine students in 1850, drawn from four Middle Western states and from New York and Pennsylvania; two hundred by 1861, the year the faculty of science was organized. Degrees lagged enrollment, as they must in a school of boys in their early teens: the first graduate, Neal H. Gillespie, took the Bachelor of Arts in 1849 — the date the institutional record keeps — and a Master of Arts was being offered as early as 1859 on three years' further study in philosophy and literature. The railroad's arrival at South Bend in 1851 widened the catchment, Chicago above all, and the growth the war years brought — 230 registered on 3 November 1863, then 300, 400 and 500 pressed in, in the base fragment's telling — was growth in the same structure: more boys on the same ladder, not a new institution.

Fire before the great fire. The fire of 1879 stands whole in the base; the early college had its own fires, and they shaped it. In 1849 the Manual Labor School was completely destroyed by fire — the loss that, in the Archives' account, convinced Sorin to the gamble of sending a company of brothers and townspeople to the California gold rush to recoup. In 1855 the original log cabins near Old College, by then used as stables, burned, and much farm equipment and the storehouse were destroyed with them; the fire stayed contained and did not touch the college buildings. The log church of 1843 was accidentally burned in 1856, as the base records. Disease did more damage than flame in these years: the cholera of 1854 stands in the base, and the Archives' early-years account adds annual summer outbreaks of malaria and sickness so constant that Sorin more than once considered abandoning the lakes site altogether — the drainage of the marsh between the lakes, carried in the base, was the engineering answer he chose instead. An institution that carried no fire insurance until 1848, and then only 3,000 dollars, was rebuilding something nearly every year of its first two decades; the one-summer rebuild of 1879 was a habit learned early, not a miracle invented then.

The brothers' industries and the novitiate. The early college ran on the congregation's labor, and the base fragment's students'-eye account of November 1845 — tailor shop, printing office, carpenter shop, blacksmith shop, gardener's house, not thirty acres cleared — is the ground floor of an industrial system that grew with the school. Brickmaking was among the first of the brothers' trades; by the middle 1860s the kilns were firing some 800,000 bricks a year — the college quite literally made the material of its own enlargement of 1865. The printing office that began under Brother Joseph produced the Ave Maria from May 1865 and, two years later, the first Scholastic. The novitiate on the island formed the men who staffed all of it. Tuition stood at 100 dollars in the middle 1860s. When the enlarged college of 1865 rose on the 1844 building's site and was dedicated on 31 May 1866, the early college ended by its own success: the six-year ladder, the Minims, the preparatory boys, the manual-labor apprentices and the novices had become more than one building, or one president acting alone, could hold — and Sorin in that same May of 1865 laid the presidency down.

Sources:

1. Philip S. Moore, C.S.C., "Academic Development of Notre Dame," introduction and College of Science section (archives.nd.edu) — the six-year collegiate course of the 1854–55 catalogue, the French collège comparison, the 1862 commercial course, degrees and structure.
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, "Edward Sorin & Notre Dame's Early Years" (sites.nd.edu) — enrollment around thirty in the first years, transience, the English course, the fires of 1849 and 1855, disease and the abandonment question, Wack's count of chartered Catholic colleges.
3. Prospectus of St. Edward's Hall, Preparatory Department, in the university's Annual Catalogues/Bulletins (archives.nd.edu) — the first pupil a Minim, the 1854 separation, the lay teachers named, the sisters' charge from 1863.
4. Catholic Encyclopedia (1911), "University of Notre Dame" — sixty-nine students in 1850, two hundred in 1861, the theological fifth by 1850; New Catholic Encyclopedia accounting of the preparatory and Minim shares, both as carried in the base record.
5. A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895) — the 1863–65 enrollment climb, brickmaking at 800,000 a year, tuition at 100 dollars, the 1879 community census, as carried in the base fragment.