Loretto Academy, Nerinx, KY
by Monica L. Mercado
Loretto Academy building, est. 1886. All photographs by author, 2019, unless otherwise noted.
To get to the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse entails a winding drive through narrow roads in rural central Kentucky. This area, south of Louisville and Bardstown, is still called the “Holy Land,” an acknowledgment of the region’s long history of Roman Catholic settlement.
Equipped with a hand-drawn map of the property and driving directions printed out from the sisters’ website, I see my phone signal drop out somewhere between the Bluegrass Parkway and Holy Cross Road. I remember a polite note of caution appended to the visitor page on the website: “Though the Motherhouse itself is quite technologically connected, in this part of the country sometimes GPS works well, sometimes it doesn’t. And Google has a hard time finding the Motherhouse.”
Just when I thought I had lost my way, I found Loretto.
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Loretto Motherhouse grounds, facing Badin Pond.
The Loretto Motherhouse in Nerinx, Kentucky, established in 1824, is a sprawling 788 acre property where Catholic sisters still work and live. The Loretto Community land ethic, an early twenty-first century commitment, affirms the sisters’ responsibility for taking care of this place, and conserving its resources, which include a working farm, three lakes, and more than fifty acres of native grasses and wildflowers. But it is not the land I am here to see.
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Loretto Academy building, est. 1834, now a sister’s artist’s studio.
In 1839, the editors of the Pilot, Boston’s Catholic newspaper, directed its readers and all friends of women’s education to the prospectus of Loretto Female Academy, “on the road from Bardstown.” The setting, the sisters wrote, was healthy; the grounds spacious; the buildings elegant. Everything was designed “to the purposes of education, and sufficiently capacious for the comfortable accommodations of 150 pupils.” The academy’s sister-teachers were chosen “with a view not only to talent and learning, but also to disposition and aptitude to fashion.” In their classrooms, dining halls, and dormitories, Loretto Academy would “habituate the young mind to what is useful, elegant, and proper.”
To trace the stories of Catholic academy girls in nineteenth-century America—girls whose white skin and class privilege, I argue, made them symbols of both US Catholic aspirations and anti-Catholic nightmares—I started making convent road trips. Even repurposed convent academies are often remarkably maintained, and I am drawn to their parlors, porches, hallways, and anterooms. The “select” academies I write about were set apart from the other properties Catholic sisters operated simultaneously, such as free schools or orphanages; the separate locations marked differences of race and class. Up a hill, or down the road, the nineteenth-century Catholic convent academy was an incubator for “elegant and proper” Catholic daughters (and some Protestants, too).
When I am standing in the hallways of this former Loretto Academy, I see, in quiet detail, exactly what the school prospectus once loudly boasted. I take photographs of the windows and floors and staircases. I feel the weight of nineteenth-century US Catholic aspirations, and their exclusionary legacies.
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Nerinckx’s log cabin, via Wikimedia Commons.
Nerinx, Kentucky was named for the Belgian priest Charles Nerinckx, who helped establish the Loretto order in the 1810s. The names of the Loretto foundresses—Ann Havern, Mary Rhodes, and Christina Stuart—are absent from the two road markers that explain this place to passersby, yet the women’s teaching mission is inscribed in the built environment. Loretto Academy, the sisters’ school for paying girls, was built on the Motherhouse grounds in the early 1830s; a larger, more modern academy building was erected in 1886. “This was the real work of the Sisterhood,” wrote Nerinckx’s biographer in 1915, describing in words what is obvious on site: the four-story brick academy was built to last, dwarfing the remains of Nerinckx’s log cabin, just across the way.
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Loretto Academy, Kentucky. Hermann Post Card Co., postmarked 5 August 1920. Collection of the author.
In the early 1900s, printers like the Hermann Post Card Co. published color images of convent academy buildings. The lawns are lush. Trees, planters, and benches offer views to the road, but the grounds are empty. Rarely did school postcards depict the Loretto Academy women. All I know about this postcard is that it was written in the summer of 1920 to Anna Esser, an upstate New Yorker like me. On the back, Anna’s brother Jos—a priest in the diocese of Rochester—sent his little sister a message. “Here is a good place.” A good place for good girls.
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Loretto Academy, Kentucky. Hermann Post Card Co., postmarked 5 August 1920. Collection of the author.
“Here is a good place,” Anna Esser read on the back of a hastily written postcard, 100 years ago. By the time she received her brother’s note in the mail, the Loretto Academy had closed, its building repurposed to house a rapidly growing Loretto novitiate, girls and women training to take their religious vows. Today, what was once the academy auditorium operates as a museum, collections storage, and research suite known as the Loretto Heritage Center. Emptied of students and novices, the rest of the former academy building is now a busy site for administering the work of a twenty-first century order of women religious and their volunteer corps.
I wonder about this place as I walk loops around the former academy buildings—they feel both vacant and full of life. At lunch in the Motherhouse dining hall, I tell the sisters about my research and they offer me sticky-sweet bourbon balls in return. “Come back and finish your book here,” they say. The Cedars of Peace retreat cabins, or hermitages, are in the woods about a half mile from where we sit, far enough away that they fall off the hand-drawn Motherhouse map, in an area marked “silence, please.” I have thought about writing here ever since I returned from Kentucky last fall and each time I am tempted I remind myself that I like being alone until I don’t like being alone at all.
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Loretto cemetery.
A global pandemic in the nine months since my Kentucky road trip has changed what it means to be alone, and dashed my writing retreat daydreams. In March 2020, a new note was added to the visitors page on the Loretto website: “Ordinarily, visitors are welcome at the Loretto Motherhouse. However, due to the continuing emergence of cases of COVID-19 infection, including in Kentucky, visits to the Motherhouse campus are discouraged until further notice.” (Motherhouse campuses are increasingly home to long-term care facilities, making their isolation even more vital.)
Now that the libraries, archives, historic sites, and school campuses that sustain our research are largely vacant, with access closed or highly restricted to prevent the spread of disease, it seems silly to have ever imagined the Loretto campus as empty at all. I think of the women who welcomed me and made my travel possible, here, and at each of the convents I visited while writing a book about girls long gone. I stare at images of nineteenth-century convent academies on my laptop screen and wonder what my work will look like going forward. Why am I attached to these places? What am I trying to see?
Just when I thought I had lost my way, I found Loretto.
Monica L. Mercado is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University, affiliated with women's studies and museum studies. Her current book project—a study of girlhood and the making of nineteenth-century US Catholicism—has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. During the 2019-2020 academic year she was a research associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, where she also held an appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and North American Religions.