St. Hedwig’s School — the Relay School

School from the parish’s first years — Brothers of Holy Cross from 1882 — 860 pupils in 1895 — the sisters in residence at the Academy

The staffing relay: No school in the city shows the web’s workings more completely than St. Hedwig’s, the great Polish parish of the west side. Its school was taught first by secular teachers. In 1882 Brother Stanislaus, a Brother of Holy Cross, took charge — the event is carried in Brother Aidan’s Extracts — and the brothers’ tenure runs through the school’s documented growth: a brother and two lay teachers with about 240 children in 1883; Brother Stanislaus and two laymen with 275 students in 1888. The first brick schoolhouse, built in 1884 and then the city’s largest, burned on February 4, 1886, and was rebuilt the same year for 28,000 dollars, 126 by 62 feet, twelve schoolrooms. By 1895 the school held 860 pupils under three Brothers and five Sisters of Holy Cross together; by Blanchard’s 1898 account the same mixed faculty stood; and by Alerding’s 1907 count the school had passed wholly to the sisters — 735 children taught by eight Sisters of the Holy Cross and five female lay teachers, the sisters residing at St. Joseph’s Academy one block away. In one school’s forty years the record shows the whole system’s staffing history in miniature: lay teachers, then brothers, then brothers and sisters together, then sisters with lay teachers beside them.

The high school: St. Hedwig’s also kept a parish high school, and its end is part of the web’s secondary story: the parish high school was absorbed by South Bend Catholic before the 1953 consolidation, as the banked Schools record carries it — the west side’s secondary pupils passing first to the consolidated Catholic high school of the 1930s–40s and then, in 1953, to Saint Joseph High School.

Sources:

1. Brother Aidan’s Extracts, no. 522, University of Notre Dame Archives — Brother Stanislaus taking charge of St. Hedwig’s school in 1882; the 1883 faculty and enrollment.
2. Blanchard (1898) — the 1884 schoolhouse, the fire of February 4, 1886, the 1886 rebuilding, and the 860 pupils under three Brothers and five Sisters of Holy Cross in 1895.
3. H. J. Alerding, The Diocese of Fort Wayne, 1857–1907, St. Hedwig history, as transcribed for the St. Joseph County genealogical pages — the rebuilt school’s dimensions and 28,000-dollar cost, 735 children, eight Sisters of the Holy Cross and five lay teachers, the sisters residing at St. Joseph’s Academy.
4. The banked Religion and Schools fragments of this history — the parish course and the absorption of St. Hedwig’s high school by South Bend Catholic.