The Founding Generation — One Faculty in Many Buildings

1854–1907 — the Holy Cross sisters and brothers plant the city’s Catholic schools

The first schools: The web’s first strands are the founding generation carried in the Schools fragment, told here as the single system they were. St. Joseph Grade School dates to 1854, with the Sisters of the Holy Cross teaching in the city from that year — the sisters’ arrival and the school’s founding are one event in the record. The Brothers of Holy Cross opened their boys’ school in 1862. St. Patrick’s school followed, dated 1865 and 1872 in the parish record, taught by brothers and sisters sent from the Academy with lay teachers. St. Mary of the Assumption’s school opened in January 1884 in the parish sacristy with twenty-seven children and the Sisters of the Holy Cross teaching from the beginning — four sisters and 153 pupils by Alerding’s count of about 1907. The pattern was set in these decades and never really changed: a parish built a school, and a congregation supplied its teachers.

The Belgian school: Sacred Heart, the Belgian parish on Thomas Street (established 1896–98), opened its parochial school in September 1899 in the church basement with 110 pupils. Its first teachers were laywomen, Miss O’Connor and Miss McEvilly; two years later the school was turned over to the Sisters of the Holy Cross, who taught it two years, after which lay teachers conducted it again — the relay between the orders and the laity that would define the whole system’s later history, present at the smallest school in the web from its second year. The parish’s school and church course ends in the consolidation era below; the parish’s people founded Corpus Christi on the northwest side, and Sacred Heart’s records are kept there today.

The German school: The city’s Catholic web had a German strand as well: St. Joseph’s German-speaking parishioners and the German parishes kept their schools inside the same system, staffed from the same congregations, while the city’s German Lutherans built the separate school told in the non-Catholic entry below. The parish entries in Religion carry the German parishes whole; the school’s place in the web is the one stated here — the orders taught across the city’s language lines from the same houses.

Sources:

1. Joseph Grade School 1854, the brothers’ boys’ school 1862, St. Patrick’s school, from Brother Aidan’s Extracts and the 1901 Illustrated History of St. Joseph’s Church, read first-hand for that pass.
2. H. J. Alerding, The Diocese of Fort Wayne, 1857–1907, as carried in the St. Joseph County parish pages — St. Mary of the Assumption’s school from January 1884, four Sisters of the Holy Cross and 153 pupils; Sacred Heart’s school of September 1899, its first lay teachers, and the Sisters of the Holy Cross’s two years.
3. The banked Religion fragment of this history — the parish courses of St. Joseph, St. Patrick, St. Mary of the Assumption and Sacred Heart.