St. Joseph's Hospital: the Sisters' founding, 1881–1882

Opened 1882 — the hill at Madison Street and Notre Dame Avenue

The sisters come to the hill: The Sisters of the Holy Cross were South Bend's before the hospital was. The congregation, founded at Le Mans, France, in 1841 by Father Basil Anthony Moreau, sent sisters to this ground in 1843 to assist at the boys' school that became the University of Notre Dame, and its American motherhouse stands at Saint Mary's College. When the Civil War came, the sisters went to it: the state historical marker raised to them in 1965 states that eighty Sisters of the Holy Cross, under the leadership of Mother Angela, answered Governor Morton's call and served as Army nurses — the service that made them, aboard the Navy's first hospital ship, the Red Rover, the forerunners of the Navy Nurse Corps. A diocesan-press account gives the wartime figure differently — sixty-five of the congregation's one hundred sixty American sisters volunteering — and both counts stand in this record as their sources state them.

The hospital's ground came from Father Edward Sorin himself. In 1881, on the account Blanchard's History of the Catholic Church in Indiana (1898) gives and the parish's illustrated history of 1901 repeats, Sorin sold the St. Joseph's parish property on the hill — the old parish church on the site had burned in 1872 — to the sisters of St. Mary's Academy, the Holy Cross sisters, for a hospital. Saint Joseph Health System dates its own founding to what followed: in 1882 Saint Joseph's Hospital became, in the medical center's published words, the first institution in South Bend to care for the sick. The South Bend Evening Register reported in October 1882 that a significant portion of the facility was complete; it could accommodate approximately thirty-five patients, and its staff was the directress — Sister Mary Edward, herself a Civil War nurse veteran — two other sisters, and five volunteer physicians. The city's Catholic hospital had begun, staffed by three sisters and the doctors who gave their time.

Sources:

1. Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center / Saint Joseph Health System, published institutional history and timeline — the 1882 founding, the October 1882 Evening Register report, the approximately thirty-five patients, Sister Mary Edward and the founding staff of two sisters and five volunteer physicians.
2. Charles Blanchard, ed., History of the Catholic Church in Indiana (1898), and the St. Joseph parish illustrated history (1901) — Father Sorin's 1881 sale of the parish property on the hill to the sisters for a hospital, the old church having burned in 1872.
3. Indiana historical marker, Sisters of the Holy Cross Civil War nurses (dedicated October 1965) — eighty sisters under Mother Angela answering Governor Morton's call; Today's Catholic (Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend) — the variant figure of sixty-five of one hundred sixty sisters, carried in the entry as stated.
4. Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross — the congregation's 1841 founding at Le Mans, the sisters' 1843 arrival at Notre Dame, and the Red Rover service as the forerunner of the Navy Nurse Corps.