CSJs in slave-state Missouri

St. Louis in 1840 showing location of St. Joseph School for
Negro Girls and proximity to Mississippi River.

 

Sr. St. John Fournier

AFTER EIGHT YEARS AND TWO MINISTRIES in the little village of Carondelet, Missouri, the small band of CSJ sisters was ready to take on a new mission in the bustling riverfront city of St. Louis. 

The project, near and dear to the heart of Bishop Peter Richard Kenrick, was to be a school for the children of Black Catholics. But for the three sisters who made the short trip to St. Louis, the new mission – and their own charism to “serve the dear neighbor without distinction” – would soon put them in danger. 

The Civil War was still two decades away, but St. Louis in the 1840s was already the epicenter of conflict and controversy over slavery. Slavery was legal, thanks to the infamous Missouri Compromise of 1820, but the white population was a volatile mixture of new organized abolitionist groups and old slave-owning French and American families. Violence was not uncommon. 

Freedmen outnumbered slaves in the large Black population, and agricultural plantations were relatively few. That made St. Louis the scene of a stark and poignant situation – slaves toiling side-by-side with free Black workers in the city’s docks and shipping businesses. Along with that daily reminder of their enslavement, freedom was tantalizingly visible just half a mile away across the Mississippi River. Any slave who could cross it was free the moment he set foot in Illinois. 

Sr. Protais Deboille

In this tense milieu, Sisters St. John Fournier, Protais Deboille and Antoinette Kincaid opened the doors of the St. Joseph School for Negro Girls on Ash Wednesday (February 5), 1845. According to various CSJ histories, enrollment was between 80 and 100 girls from free families, “all good and well behaved,” and possibly a handful of slave daughters whose more open-minded masters paid for them to attend. The girls were taught reading, writing, arithmetic and other elementary subjects, French (widely spoken in the city) and embroidery – an echo of the CSJs’ lace-making ministry back in France. At no cost, catechism was taught to the rest of the Catholic slave children (including boys) on Saturdays and Sundays.

The school thrived for more than a year, according to a letter Sister St. John wrote in 1873. But it had reawakened simmering anti-Catholic sentiment in St. Louis and infuriated the slave owners. The slaves’ illiteracy kept then from reading abolitionist pamphlets and newspapers and causing trouble. 

Many white Protestants objected to providing slave children and their parents with religious education. According to Sister St. John,

We also prepared slaves for the reception of the sacraments, and this displeased the whites very much. After some time, they threatened to have us put out by force. The threats were repeated every day.

It all came to a crisis one day in 1846.

Miraculous
Medal

One morning as I was leaving the church, several people called out to me and told me that they were coming that night to put us out of the house. I said nothing to the sisters, and was not afraid, so great confidence had I in the Blessed Virgin! I put some Miraculous Medals on the entrance gate and on the fences (we already had them on all doors and windows of the house).

At eleven o'clock, the sisters woke with a start when they heard a loud noise. Out in the street was a crowd of people crying out and cursing. We recited together the Memorare and other prayers. Suddenly, the police patrol came and scattered those villains who were trying to break open the door. They returned three times that same night, but [the Blessed Virgin] protected us and they were not able to open the door from the outside nor to break it down... The day after our adventure, the Mayor of St. Louis advised Bishop Kenrick to close that school for a time and he did so.

The school never reopened, doomed a few months later when the Missouri Legislature passed law a making it illegal to provide any Black person with instruction in reading and writing. An exorbitant $500 fine was attached, equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars today. Nevertheless, the sisters quietly continued to give religious instruction to Black children.

Although they opened many other schools, that was the end of the St. Louis sisters’ teaching apostolate among American Blacks for almost 100 years, a century of agony that witnessed the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and segregated schools. But during the Great Depression, true to their charism of recognizing a need and doing something about it, the sisters started offering a high-quality Catholic education to Black elementary and high school students in the city. It is impressive, but not surprising, that these schools were desegregated (by combining with the sisters’ white schools) years ahead of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. 

Even after they were forced to close St. Joseph’s School, we like to imagine that the sisters continued to minister secretly among the Blacks of St. Louis in defiance of the authorities, going wherever the needs of the people drew them. Perhaps more than one Black child or adult learned to read and write through their help and love. We’ll never know, because the official records don’t tell these stories. But that would be the unstoppable CSJ way.

St. Louis in 1845. Maps from University
of Missouri St. Louis Mercantile Library.

 

 

The Mount Archives Blog owes a debt of gratitude to the the late Sister Jane Behlman, CSJ, archivist of the St. Louis Province, for writing about the school in her blog Jewels from Jane in 2008. 

Countess Doheny's Lace Collection

A view of the Doheny Mansion rendered in needle lace. The fine mesh
in the background is the réseau of  point de Venise à réseau.

AS WE'VE NOTED BEFORE, lace making is a recurring theme for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, and, by extension for the last 89 years, Mount St. Mary's College.

Detail shows various lace patterns. 

We've had a chance recently to explore the background of a famous lace collection with another Mount connection, the lace of Countess Estelle Doheny. This originally comprised a set of sixteen place mats with a matching table runner, monogrammed CED. Created in the 1930s, these gossamer rectangles depicted four different views of the Doheny Mansion, rendered in a type of lace called point de Venise à réseau, a particularly delicate form of needle lace (réseau translates "netted" or "meshed"). Guests of the Dohenys enjoying dinner in the mansion were treated to a tablescape of incomparable richness and Victorian opulence.

Back in September, we received a query from Nancy Milks-Evans of Lace Legacy, Etc., a Covington, Wash.-based educator and expert in rare and antique laces.  She had read about the Doheny lace and wondered whether it had been auctioned along with Countess Doheny's rare book collection back in the late 1980s. Or did the Mount still have it?

The Doheny Docents do, in fact, have some of the lace safely stored away in No. 8 and bring it out on occasion for tours. (Much of the collection is evidently missing, whereabouts unknown.)

Nancy then presented us with a minor mystery of the kind we love. Back in 1975, Carolyn S. Murray of the Los Angeles Times produced a handful of articles about Chester Place, one of which was a short sidebar about the Doheny Lace collection. Ms. Murray quoted Gwen Krakeur, the widow of Martin Krakeur, owner of Beverly Hills' famed linen store Grande Maison de Blanc and the designer of the lace.

Mrs. Krakeur recalled that the lace had been made on the island of Burano, Italy. This couldn't be right, Nancy suggested, because this special kind of lace wasn't made there – the best point de Venise à réseau came from Brussels. Did we have any documentation?

Nothing like sales receipts or anything conclusive like that – but we did find something nearly as good: details in the master's thesis of Sister Mary Irene Flanagan, CSJ.

Sister Irene, a longtime Home Economics professor who earned her degree at San Jose State College in 1967, documented the architecture, furniture and contents of the Doheny Mansion. In the section about the dining room is a picture and her description of one of the place mats:

Designed in 1931 by Mr. Martin Krakeur of the Grande Maison de Blanc, the place mat represents one of four patterns that might well be termed the most beautiful lace sets in the world. ... This is an example of the most filmy and delicate of all point lace.

Sister Irene describes how the lace took more than three years to complete by handful of artisans. And here she solves the mystery:

The designs were minutely executed on graph paper and approved before being sent to Brussels. Here the finest lace makers took on the work of point de Venise à réseau.

And, wouldn't you know, Sister Irene attributes this information to none other than Gwen Krakeur, whom she interviewed  at 8 Chester Place on November 15, 1966.

Memories are tricky, and archives will often reveal bits of conflicting information, even from the same source. We seldom have scholarly research on hand to solve a mystery but this time we lucked out, and in the process have added a footnote to the Mount's story of lace.

The collection originally comprised four each of these four  designs
of the Doheny Mansion. Remaining pieces are shown on Docent tours.

The legacy of lace

CAMPUS MINISTRY held a nice event in the Circle during Founders Week earlier this month with the intent of exposing students to a bit of CSJ history. The "Day of Lace" referred to the beautiful but important handicraft of lacemaking, which our founders, the Sisters of St. Joseph, taught to poor women early in the Order's foundation.

We might admire lace for the skill and artistry that goes into it, but we also need to remember that it meant the difference between starvation or prostitution and a life of dignity for widows and orphaned girls in 17th Century France. And it's still going on: The Sisters in some communities teach lacemaking as a meditative practice.

For Lace Day, Mount students decorated doilies and received lace-wrapped lollipops labeled with a short narrative about the CSJs. Sister Mary McKay, CSJ, of our religious studies faculty gave a short talk. This legacy is new to a lot of students, and most seemed to be paying close attention. Isn't it good to know from whence we've come?

The photo shows some of the Campus Ministry girls with a gift from a Mount alumna. Eileen Nason Rhyner '32 recently donated a handpainted wooden tray depicting Le Puy, the tiny French village where the lace ministry got going in 1650. Eileen's 60-year-old souvenir gave the Day of Lace some real geography to work with, and the tray will now become part of the CSJs' history collection at Carondelet Center.

With Lace Day, the legacy lives on.