Catholic fundraisers part of frontier life

Palatka in earlier days. Photo credit:
Palatka Railroad Preservation Society

Church and parochial school fundraisers are and were a staple of Catholic life. In Florida, that was as true a century ago as it is today.

On superficial levels, the fundraisers on the Florida frontier were different. For example, in 1911 a benefit performance for the Sisters of St. Joseph in Palatka featured musical performances. But, oh, how the music has changed. 

The event was written up in The Palatka News on June 30, 1911, and given the headline "Benefit A Big Success." The benefit netted $44.25 in 1911 dollars. That's almost $1,200 today. 

That's not too shabby, when you consider certain facts. Tickets cost only 10 cents, about $2.75 today. The event took place in a Florida summer in the days before air conditioning. Can you say sweltering? And the city's population at that time was only about 3,800 people. Finally, anti-Catholicism was rearing its head in Florida in 1911.

The news reporter was impressed by the event's proceeds, the size of the crowd, and the artists who performed. Most were "well known local artists." They treated the audience to violin solos, piano music, and vocal and spoken performances. The setting was nice, too - a local theater named the Orpheum.

The songs named were mysteries to me: "Sergeant Kitty," "Listening to the Vesper Bells," "Pheenie," "You Give Me Your Love." The audience loved the Vesper Bells song so much they gave singer Mrs. Louis Kalkfield an encore. I wish I knew her first name. Married women in those days were identified in public by their husband's names. 

The fundraiser also featured a "special picture of incidents in the life of Christ." No other explanation is given. It made me wonder if the picture depicted the Stations of the Cross.  A Catholic news reporter would have said as much, but a non-Catholic reporter might not have known that.

All in all, the event seems to have been a high point in town on a quiet summer day in 1911. 

The Sisters of St. Joseph operated an academy in Palatka for decades. The school was still popular enough in 1922 that The Palatka News found it necessary to squash rumors that the academy was closing. The May 24, 1922 edition placed a prominent notice on Page 2, just above an etching and tidbit about the inventor of the Eskimo Pie.

The Sisters, though, got the largest headline on the page: "St. Joseph's Will Not Close School." The notice said the Sisters of St. Joseph's Academy wished to correct a rumor that the school wouldn't open for the fall semester. There was no foundation to the rumor and the Sisters were at a loss to determine how it got started.

My cynical side suspects the rumor started in the anti-Catholicism that had become prevalent in Florida by the early 1920s. But, as with the original rumor, I have no foundation for my musings. Just general knowledge of the political and religious climates of that time in Florida.

The Sisters of St. Joseph had a deep footprint in Palatka by 1922. They had opened their school in the riverfront city in 1876. I learned that from a 2008 dissertation by Barbara E. Mattick that's accessible online via the Florida State University Digital Library. The doctoral disseration covers the ministries of the Catholic Sisters of St. Augustine over the course of 61 years. I look forward to reading more of its 226 pages.

St. Joseph's Academy lasted a few years beyond the rumor days. A 2001 article in The Orlando Sentinel said the academy was replaced by a parish school named St. James in 1929.

Many Catholic schools struggle to stay open today. They and our Catholic churches need our support more than ever. May the next fundraiser you attend, in person or online, be filled with beautiful music and open hearts. 

Drexel sisters' philanthropy touched Florida

 St. Peter Claver Church in 1950.
(Photo credit: St. Peter Claver community)

The St. Peter Claver Catholic community in Tampa is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year (1893-2018). It's a fitting time to remember the roots of this community, plus its links to St. Katharine Drexel and her sister, Louise Drexel Morrell.

Catholics in other areas of the country don't always realize Florida was Catholic mission territory well into the 20th century. I've encountered Catholic history publications that gloss over Florida's rich Catholic history. The authors don't understand the heroic efforts of religious and lay settlers to make sure the "Cross in the Sand"* stayed put.

Historian and pastor Fr. Michael J. McNally helps us remember. In his excellent book, Catholic Parish Life on Florida's West Coast, 1860-1968" (Catholic Media Ministries, 1996), he writes that, in Florida's early years:

"Winter visitors who came from places where Catholicism had a complex infrastructure were often appalled at Florida's lack of ecclesiastical institutions." (142)

These visitors, plus clergy, religious sisters and brothers, and local lay Catholics successfully worked to change that. McNally relates numerous examples. The Drexel sisters are two of the best known. They are widely recognized for philanthropic and spiritual work on behalf of Native Americans and African Americans in the western and southern United States. Less well known is that Florida was among their beneficiaries in the South.

McNally writes that Louise Morrell visited Tampa in 1911 and "conceived the idea of erecting a Catholic church for Tampa's black community" (143). At that time, the community already had St. Peter Claver School, which dates to 1893. (Arsonists torched the first school building.)

McNally says that in 1899, Mother Katharine Drexel, as she was known at the time, gave $2,000 to support the educational initiative (189). That's about $57,000 in today's dollars. Saint Drexel also gave more money at later dates and visited the school in 1904.

The St. Peter Claver Mission's church building was erected in 1915 with money donated by Louise  Morrell. No one in the Tampa business community would loan the pastor of nearby Sacred Heart parish the $3,000 needed to build St. Peter Claver church (189). That's equal to about $75,000 in 2018. The first Mass was said on Christmas Day 1915, in the new mission church that was large enough to seat 200 people.

Louise Morrell supported the St. Peter Claver community into the 1930s. She visited again after 1911. Through the years, donated statues, books and school desks in addition to giving financial support. Mother Katharine Drexel is known to have visited Tampa only once - in 1904 - to see St. Peter Claver School. On the same trip, she also journeyed to St. Benedict the Moor School in St. Augustine, another school she helped financially.

Leading ladies of the secular community also supported Catholic efforts in frontier Tampa. McNally mentions such notables as Henry Plant's wife, Margaret K. Plant, and community leader Kate Jackson (143).

But so did regular folk. In nearby San Antonio - Florida not Texas! (It's about 30 miles from Tampa) - a determined settler started a home school. Marie Cecile Morse was a mother of six who tired of waiting for community leaders to start a Catholic school in newly settled San Antonio. So she started one herself, in her home, in 1883 with 14 students. I'll tell that story in a future blog post.

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*Cross in the Sand, The Early Catholic Church in Florida, 1513-1870, by the late historian and  former priest Michael Gannon, and Fr. McNally's books on church history in South and West Florida, should be required reading for those interested in Florida's Catholic history.

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.

A mission to educate

I saw this photo of a Catholic academy while browsing vintage Florida newspapers online, and was immediately intrigued. First, I was surprised, because the photo was part of a large ad telling of the virtues of the academy. Then my questions arose. Where was Loretto? What happened to the school? Why had I never heard of either?

Little did I expect that research would reveal a fascinating thread of Florida Catholic history.

Started as an educational initiative soon after the Civil War, the academy had evolved into a boarding school for boys by the time the ad was placed in the 1890s.  As the photo states, the school was situated in what was then the town of Loretto. The community was later swallowed by the giant city of Jacksonville, but it retains its named distinction today and is considered a neighborhood.

Loretto is adjacent to the historically significant Mandarin, now also a neighborhood. In fact, the other photo on this page is from an article that locates the St. Joseph's Church and school as being in Mandarin itself. This second photo is from a 1914 encyclopedic publication with the unwieldy title of The Catholic Church in the United States of America,Undertaken to Celebrate the Golden Jubilee of His Holiness, Pope Pius X.  At that time, the mission of Mandarin was considered 13 miles south of Jacksonville. 

More interesting, the mission was first visited by a priest from St. Augustine in 1787. Florida wasn't yet Florida at that time. The land was under Spanish rule.

The first church - I guess the first St. Jospeh's - was built in 1858, very early by Florida frontier standards. By that time, Florida was a U.S. state and the Mandarin Mission had suffered from pressure and resistance from non-Catholics. The congregation of St. Joseph's was smaller than it had been more than a half-century earlier. Fr. John Chambon's 1863 census reported 120 Catholics. In comparison, from 140 to 150 baptisms alone were performed during the six-year period between 1787 and 1793.

Fr. Chambon is considered the founder of the mission. But a Fr. de la Fosse of St. Augustine is credited with starting the school in 1868, with Sister Mary Julia and Sister Mary Bernard of the Sisters of St. Joseph, also of St. Augustine, according to the Golden Jubilee book.

 A full history of the still-vibrant St. Joseph's Church is featured on the parish website and it tells how Sisters Julia and Bernard traveled 27 miles by oxcart to start teaching. They lived a mile from the school and once got lost in the thick undergrowth and wandered around until late into the night.

The academy grew into a boarding school after the sisters started taking in boarders to help offset costs. It grew in stature, too, according to the parish history, and had students from as far away as Cuba. The sisters also taught free day school for boys and girls. Because of segregation laws, the sisters had to teach the African-American students in a separate building.

The academy lasted just shy of a century. It closed in 1963, after a remarkable run. The associated church remains a vibrant parish, and its online history is well worth reading. Not only does it provide an overview, it includes details that help convey the challenges faced by Catholics who served in Florida when it was mission territory. I salute them.