In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Pioneers on a Mission for GodThe Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Wheeling, 1848-1860
  • Barbara J. Howe

May 31, 2008, marked the end of an era in Wheeling's history. After 160 years, the nuns of the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Visitandines, closed Mount de Chantal Academy. Eight nuns had come to Wheeling in 1848 to start the Wheeling Female Academy (WFA), the school's name while located downtown. Eight nuns remained when the Mount closed. Financial exigencies, especially high utility costs, forced the nuns to close the academy that had educated generations of girls and, more recently some boys, who were Roman Catholics, other Christians, and non-Christians.1 Two years later, in the spring of 2010, the five sisters remaining at Mount de Chantal joined the community of Visitation Sisters at Georgetown Visitation Academy in Washington, D.C., leaving the future of the Mount's buildings in doubt at the time of this writing.2 The end of this era is a fitting time to document this community whose story helps us to understand the early development of Catholic institutions in Wheeling and the complexity of religious life for mid-nineteenth-century nuns.

The Visitandines' history is inextricably linked to the history of women religious in Europe, the United States, western Virginia, and Wheeling, for they, with the Sisters of St. Joseph who came in 1853 to be nurses at Wheeling Hospital, were the only orders of women religious in the city and in transmontane Virginia before the Civil War. While the emphasis here is on their role in the history of Wheeling, particularly its early history of Catholicism, some background is important to understand their place in a wider world of women religious.

Carol Coburn and Martha Smith have argued that "the religious community is one of the oldest and least analyzed of women's groups in the United States" and that understanding this "woman-defined space and culture" helps us to understand nineteenth-century women's culture.3 Certainly the lack of analysis is true for the Visitandine community in Wheeling, as [End Page 59] the only previously published scholarly work on this order, or any order in what is now West Virginia, is Joseph G. Mannard's 2003 article in American Catholic Studies, "'Supported Principally by the Funds of Protestants': Wheeling Female Academy and the Making of the Catholic Community in Antebellum Western Virginia," which focused on Protestant-Catholic relationships at the school.4 The goal here, then, is to examine how the women in this cloistered order entered their community, the different roles that they played in their "woman-defined space and culture" and, to a lesser extent, their interactions with the outside world and their bishop.

Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Jane de Chantal started the order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Duchy of Savoy, France, in 1610. The first monastery in the United States opened in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., in 1799, and formally affiliated with the Visitation Order in Annecy, France, in 1816.5 This was just nine years after the English Carmelite nuns established the first convent in the original thirteen colonies at Port Tobacco, Maryland, although the Ursulines had established an academy in New Orleans in 1727.6

The Wheeling community, like each Visitandine community, was independent, keeping in touch by sending periodic circulars around to each monastery. They governed themselves, with a mother superior in charge elected by secret ballot who served a renewable three-year term. There was no superior general, visitor-general, or general chapter.7 Each community was "defined by its rule–a guide to the sister's identity as a member of this community, and the charism … that the holy foundress had established the community to pursue."8 Any questions about the order's rules went to the "house of Annecy [where the order was founded], the sainte-source," which had only the right to advise in the role of "an elder sister."9 Their home was a monastery, not a convent, to connote their cloistered life. However, the nuns were ultimately under the jurisdiction of...

pdf