Florida's first Catholic school

Saint Mary Star of the Sea students gather 
outside Mary Immaculate Convent in the
1890s in Key West. The school was attached
 to the convent and operated by the Sisters 
of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary.
Photo credit: Florida Memory

Key West is famous for many reasons. A few don't align with typical Margaritaville lore. Such as the fact that the first Catholic school in Florida was in, you guessed it, Key West.

A handful of brave Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary ventured south, way south, from Canada to Key West, in 1868 at the request of Florida's then-bishop, Augustin Verot. 

The congregation's website offers an overview of the sisters' Florida history. It notes that the bishop, "Dreading the introduction of the Sisters to their first Florida summer," suggested an autumn arrival. Smart move, that.

The sisters' destination was the parish of Saint Mary Star of the Sea. The church was built in 1852. It was the first Catholic church in Key West and in all South Florida. And only the fifth Catholic church in Florida. 

The church today is a Basilica. To learn more about its history, check the footnote links on its Wikipedia page. They'll take you to archived history pages. (2024 update: The church's website used to offer a history book for sale but the web link no longer works.) 

Heat, humidity, and tropical climate aside, the sisters faced an adventure from the start. A fierce storm snapped the masts off the ship on which they traveled. They "prayed fervently for protection" and were grateful to reach their destination alive. But their first view of Key West didn't impress them, even though Key West was the largest city in Florida at the time. It had a population of about 5,000.

"A curious crowd of onlookers" met the sisters at the pier, where, thankfully, the church's assistant pastor also waited. And the sisters' first residence was a former Civil War barracks that was being used by locals as a goat barn. I kid you not. The story of the journey and arrival is on the congregation's website, with portions also posted on the current Basilica School of Saint Mary Star of the Sea's website.

One of the sisters died less than a year later from yellow fever, which also claimed the priests on the island. Life could be tough in Key West. Safe to say they weren't drinking margaritas on Duval Street.

The sisters persevered, as Catholic sisters always do. Within a decade, they had consecutively opened schools for local white children, local African-American children and local Cuban girls. Each group was in a separate school because of segregation laws. Students of all colors followed the same curriculum and were taught by many of the same teachers.

After 115 years of service, the sisters left Key West in 1983. Their legacy remains, though, in the parish, the school, church and in the descendants of the hundreds of youth they taught. What doesn't remain is the distinct character of Key West. Today, the island is almost a parody of itself.

School days - so distant, so near

These students and teachers posed for a photo outside their
South Florida schoolhouse in the 1890s.
Photo credit: Florida Memory, State Archives of Florida

Two things stood out as I browsed school news from more than a century ago. One, people spouted opinions about education with vigor. Two, the sub-collegiate curriculum -- aka high school -- in the academy that grew to become Florida State University was surprisingly challenging to my 21st century eyes.

Really, I should make it three things. Third, teacher pay was pretty poor. School salaries in Ocala in 1897 ranged from $25 to $50 a month. The modern equivalent is $731 to $1,462. That was for a seven-month term.

The salaries were described in an Ocala Evening Star article about the July 5, 1897 Marion County Board of Public Instruction meeting. Nothing indicates whether the salary range applied to teachers in both white and black schools. These were the days of segregation. A separate article on the same news page noted the 40 teachers present at the opening exercises of "The Colored Normal" in Witness hall. The Normal was a teaching institute, but it seems it was conducted in a church. By the second day, 75 teachers were in attendance. No word on money. The article received a fraction of the space allocated to the board's affairs.

Downstate in Titusville a few years later, a letter writer in the Jan. 26, 1900 Florida Star
lamented he way his "former colleagues on the school board" wasted money. R.N. Andrews of Cocoa chastised officials for spending  more than $600 on charts, maps and books when they could have procured the same supplies at a much lower cost. In his long letter, he wrote he'd been contacted by numerous people who had complaints about school business.

That same year, 1900, back in Ocala, residents were protesting a proposed special school tax district. They wanted an election on the district postponed and the district's boundaries redrawn. You can read their reasons in the Sept. 6, 1900 issue of the Ocala Evening Star.

While adults agitated, students sweated at their studies, if the curriculum in the April 18, 1901 edition of The Weekly Tallahassean is any indication. A long article about the West Florida Seminary mentioned classes taken by students in the sub-collegiate course. These students had to be at least 12 to enroll, and had to "pass through three years of hard study" to advance to the collegiate level.

Their courses included: grammar, rhetoric, literature, business and higher arithmetic, bookkeeping and commercial law, algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics, civil government, physiology and hygiene, botany, physical and political geography, history and Latin.

I suspect "business and higher arithmetic" was akin to the "finite mathematics" I took to fulfill the Quantitative Learning requirement when I returned to college in middle age. Granted, I was rusty and years out of practice. But the memory of calculating interest on mortgages, and other such business exercises, gives me renewed respect for those long-ago learners.

School site echoes vibrant past

Does this building still stand? This is
 a 2011 image of St. Benedict the Moor
School. (Credit: Google Street View)

Second of two parts

Six years is a long time in our age of instant communications. The turn-of-the-20th-century building at the core of today's post might not exist anymore. I can't find photos of St. Benedict the Moor School newer than a 2011 Google Street View, pictured first in this post. That's an ominous sign, for the school's history is rich. The physical remainder, as you can see, is in dire shape.

Built in 1898, St. Benedict school was "one of the first all-black Catholic schools in Florida," according to a 2014 article in the St. Augustine Record. The St. Benedict parish in St. Augustine's Lincolnville neighborhood was founded in the 1870s, during Reconstruction. St. Benedict's Church was built in the early 1900s. It's been restored and appears vibrant again. 

A few web resources linked in this post document the church and school history. As always, for me, the social history leaps out. Such as the time three Catholic nuns were arrested in 1916 because they were white women teaching black schoolchildren. Jim Crow laws forbade such interaction during segregation years in Florida (and probably in other states).

As a Catholic-owned educational institution, St. Benedict's was a private school. A judge ruled the law didn't apply to private schools, and the nuns were released. Their names deserve mention, though: Sisters Mary Thomasine, Scholastica and Beningus, according to the St. Augustine Record article. That news story also notes the arrests occurred on an Easter Sunday.

St. Benedict's students ride in a school float decorated
for an Emancipation Day parade in the 1920s.
(Credit: State Archives of Florida/Twine)

The information about the nuns is listed in various websites and on a historical marker erected on the grounds of the church complex. Photos of the marker are below.

Lesser known are the photos by African-American Richard Twine, a photographer who's the subject of Part One of this post. He photographed St. Benedict class pictures, church gatherings and even the school's float in an Emancipation  Day parade in the 1920s. The images bring to life the human side of one of the decades when St. Benedict School thrived. The Twine collection may be viewed on the Florida Memory website.

The school closed in the 1960s, some 70 years after it was built with money from philanthropist and Catholic nun St. Katharine Drexel. Restoration efforts started, but stalled. In 2004, the school was considered one of St. Augustine's most threatened historic places. I wonder if restoration remains a goal. I sure hope so.

Credit: These closeup views of the
Black Catholic Heritage historical marker
 are from a gallery on waymarking.com