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Vol. 30:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2002
Preserving the Records of Georgetown Visitation Monastery
by Sister Mada-anne Gell, VHM
In June of 1799, three women traveled by stagecoach from Philadelphia to Georgetown, which had not yet been incorporated into the District of Columbia. Responding to the request of the Reverend Leonard Neale, President of Georgetown College, and member of one of Maryland's oldest and most prominent families, these nuns intended to found ". . . a permanent religious establishment, whence the inestimable advantages of a correct education might be derived, not only to the youth of the present day, but also to those of future generations as they might succeed in the progressive lapse of time."1
The three nuns settled close to the Georgetown campus, arriving in the area 6 months before the United States Government officially moved to Washington. Georgetown Visitation Monastery has been in continuous operation on the same site for 203 years. When fire destroyed 80 percent of the main school building in July 1993, classes were suspended for just 1 day.
The School
The sisters (originally known as the "Pious Ladies") began three distinct educational efforts: a free school for the education of the poor; an academy patterned on the finest European girls' schools, which would eventually serve as a model for similar institutions throughout the nation; and individual classes for free blacks and slaves, held, of necessity, at odd times because these students were governed by the schedules of employers and masters. Most of the young people studying with the sisters were not Catholic; the Catholic population was limited, and the founders' aim was to provide educational opportunities for all young women, no matter what their religion or social class might be. Indeed, the tuition fees charged in the Academy were intended to offset the costs of running the free school.
Georgetown Visitation Monastery, 1799. (Georgetown Visitation Monastery Archives)
During the 1800s, the Visitation Order expanded throughout the United States, with pioneer groups of nuns opening schools in Baltimore and Frederick, Maryland; Mobile, Alabama; and Kaskaskia, Illinois. The school in Kaskaskia was totally submerged in June 1844, when the Mississippi River suddenly changed course. The annals, a unique account of this natural disaster, state that the sisters sent a boat to hail a paddlewheel steamer, which was lashed to the third floor, "and the furniture carried aboard; pianos, harps . . . ," the academy's most valuable instructional tools. The sisters treated river water with chemicals from the science laboratories to make it safe to drink.
Other Visitation schools were located in St. Louis, Missouri; St. Paul, Minnesota; Richmond, Virginia; Wheeling and Parkersburg, West Virginia; and further into the frontier States of Kentucky, Iowa, Nebraska, and Washington. These in turn founded others, and all modeled their demanding curriculums on that of Georgetown Visitation, emphasizing science, math, and foreign languages. Thus the school became a defining influence on the course of the development of women's education in the United States. The Visitation archival holdings are priceless not only because of what they disclose about women's history but, also, for what they reveal about the developing philosophy and techniques of educating young women at the secondary level.
The Monastery
Hundreds of women have lived out their lives in the Visitation houses in this country. From 1800 on, the nuns represented a cross section of American society. Some were highly educated, some illiterate. The Visitation Order has always accepted older women and widows as well as younger candidates. The sisters' life experiences and social backgrounds were diverse. Some came from prominent American families: Winfield Scott's daughter, Virginia, died as a young nun at Visitation. During the Civil War, when Washington churches were being appropriated for hospitals, Scott begged Abraham Lincoln to spare Visitation, considering that its use as a hospital would be "a desecration of his daughter's grave." The Visitation school in Frederick, Maryland, a town that changed hands repeatedly during the Civil War, did become a hospital, and had to replace the blood-soaked classroom floorboards when the conflict ended.
Many faced hardships to reach Georgetown. Margaret Marshall, daughter of a German family, crossed the Alleghenies on foot to reach the monastery after she overheard her father planning to marry her off to a farmer whose lands were adjacent to his. There were Northerners and Southerners: during the War between the States, the brother of one nun was the commandant of Fort Delaware, a Union prisoner-of-war camp; another's brother was a prisoner in the same camp. Gentle pressure was brought to bear, and the Confederate was discretely released.
An earlier series of letters describes the terror experienced by Ursuline nuns in Charlestown, a town outside of Boston, when an anti-Catholic mob rioted and burned their convent and school to the ground late one night. The flight of the Ursulines and their students-the youngest just toddlers-to the crypt at the bottom of the garden, their escape to the home of a distant neighbor, the dialogue between Know Nothing leaders and the nuns, the shouts of the mob as it torched the buildings, give incredible life to the narrative, written by a young nun to her mother, herself a Visitation Sister.
The religious community reflected the diversity of the American population at large, with some distinctive exceptions: Juana Iturbide (d. 1828), daughter of the Emperor of Mexico, attended the academy and, on her deathbed (tuberculosis was endemic at the time), begged to be received into the Order. She made vows and is buried in the crypt beneath Visitation's chapel. The lives of all the sisters were-and continue to be-fully documented, chiefly through the Convent Book, a 37-pound ledger that the sisters sign, on their own pages, every year. After the death of a sister, a short obituary of the nun is written and entered in the book following her final entry.
Of equal historic value is the collection of "Death Letters." These biographies, circulated when a sister dies, detail the life of each nun, linking the membership of Visitation to the wider community by supplying information on nationally and locally acclaimed American families. Even financial records reveal fascinating particulars. Thus the disposition of real estate or transactions involving the buying, selling, and care of slaves present important data for the analytical study of social change and the role of women in business affairs.
Because Visitation has remained in the same location for more than two centuries, and because of the continuity of the religious community-once a woman makes her vows, she remains in the same convent until death-the records, account books, ledgers, annals, diaries, letters, legal papers, property deeds, legacies, financial accounts, drawings, photographs, and other valuables that have accumulated over the years are of extraordinary historical significance.
Sketch of Georgetown Visitation Monastery, 1990. (Georgetown Visitation Monastery Archives)
The Visitation Archives contain a rich collection of personal records that document social and political life. Eyewitness accounts of key events in American history include a description of the 1814 burning of Washington by the British; an account of Commodore John Jacob Jones' capture, imprisonment, and escape from Algiers during the war with Tripoli; and a first-person description of a student's rescue from the sinking Titanic. And these are only a few of the stories. Annual letters, circulated among all of the Visitation houses in the country, as well as correspondence with European monasteries, offer varying views of national and world events as well as a comparison of women's social, economic, and religious perceptions at various times and places. Most of the Visitation holdings are not church related; a religious institution is composed of people. Their stories, and the records of their various transactions, form the bulk of the Visitation collection.
Until 1993 there was no systematic way for researchers to retrieve information from this rich lode of sources. Holdings had never been organized according to archival principles. Papers were stored haphazardly in cardboard boxes, file cabinets, or in manila envelopes on open shelves in attic rooms. But when planning for the Visitation Bicentennial began in 1991, the organization of the archives assumed highest priority. There was no money to finance such a project, and the nuns were nervous about approaching the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, worried that as a Roman Catholic group, their holdings would be too specialized, of limited interest.
However, NHPRC staff members, after surveying some of the collection, affirmed the value of the social, cultural, political, and religious history of America contained in the Visitation archives. They offered invaluable assistance in the preparation of a grant proposal. Visitation received funding for a 3-year period, during which its holdings were read, organized, indexed, and made accessible to researchers. Several papers utilizing materials in the Visitation archives have been published by independent scholars since the organization of the holdings.
Many church-related institutions are being closed or turned over to new management at this time, largely because the number of men and women entering religious life is decreasing. It becomes vitally important, as these institutions dissolve or change hands, that their archival holdings be preserved intact. In the past 10 years, Georgetown Visitation has become the repository for the holdings of several other Visitation monasteries. Thus the preservation of its holdings, undertaken with the assistance of the NHPRC, has made possible access to knowledge of an important element of the American heritage.
Sister Mada-anne Gell, VHM, directed the NHPRC-sponsored project to preserve the records of Georgetown Visitation Monastery, Washington, DC.
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