Expansion Despite “National Difficulties”: The Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Wheeling, 1861–1870

Eight nuns of the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Visitandines) arrived in Wheeling, Virginia, in April 1848 from their Baltimore monastery to open the Wheeling Female Academy (WFA). By April 1861, when the Civil War started, they had successfully survived the challenges of establishing a new school with a national reputation to educate both Catholic and Protestant girls and with a particularly strong music program under Sr. Mary Agnes Gubert; taught hundreds of students at St. Joseph’s Benevolent School in St. James’s Cathedral (now St. Joseph’s Cathedral); recruited new sisters from the local area; and become an important, respected part of Wheeling’s growing role as the center of Roman Catholicism in transmontane Virginia.¹ During the next decade, Wheeling would grow from 14,083 residents in 1860 to 19,280 in 1870, while remaining the largest, most heavily industrialized, and most ethnically diverse city in Virginia west of the Appalachian Mountains and, after 1863, in West Virginia. It would also be the capital of the Restored Government of Virginia and the first capital of West Virginia.²

The themes of the nuns’ early years–how women entered this cloistered order, the various roles they played in this “woman-defined space and culture,” and their interactions with the outside world and their bishop– became even more complex during the 1860s.³ For example, during the war, the nuns constructed a massive new woman-centered space, Mount de Chantal Academy, which they named for St. Jane de Chantal, who had founded the order with St. Francis de Sales in Savoy, France, in 1610, and they helped establish a new monastery at Parkersburg, West Virginia. After the war, some members left Wheeling to establish another new monastery at Abingdon, Virginia, and to go out into the world to restore their finances. While the nuns continued to choose their own mother superior to direct their work, Bishop Richard Vincent Whelan, bishop of the Diocese of Wheeling since its formation in 1850, had the official authority over their order and continued to play a critical role.

Most of our knowledge of western/West Virginia during the 1860s focuses on the Civil War and statehood/Reconstruction movements, with Wheeling as a center of the discussion because of its political importance to the formation of the new state. While standard West Virginia history texts covering this decade do not include the Visitandines, the war brought challenges greater than any the nuns had faced earlier. Sr. Rita Papin, a historian of the order, noted cryptically, for instance, that, in 1861, the situation was so bad that sisters and students were forbidden to discuss issues because the “Community & school were torn by partisanship.”⁴

The Visitandines are also missing from the historiography of women in the Civil War. Histories of women as teachers focus mostly on women who taught freedpeople, not nuns who taught girls.⁵ Meanwhile, the histories of women religious focus on their role as nurses, but the Visitandines were teachers, not nurses, and they were a cloistered order, not one that could be out in the world, as were the Sisters of St. Joseph (SSJs), Wheeling’s only other order of women religious who were both nurses at Wheeling Hospital and teachers.⁶ In addition, the only scholarly work to date on the Visitandines is Joseph G. Mannard’s articles and Barbara J. Howe’s Spring 2010 article in West Virginia History.⁷

It is also important to try to situate the Visitandines within a larger picture of the roles of women religious in the border states that President Abraham Lincoln identified as Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri during the Civil War. In spite of the plethora of literature on the war, historians have paid surprisingly little attention to the lives of women religious in these states, other than to write about their work as nurses.⁸ Even an overview such as Judith Harper provides under the title of “Catholic Nuns” in Women during the Civil War: An Encyclopedia discusses only their work as...