In 1860, Dominican Nuns from Cabra, Ireland came to the city to open an academy for girls. Shortly after their arrival, they began to accept boys who were too young to start their education with the Christian Brothers. Later, when yellow fever forced the Christian Brothers to leave the city, the Sisters, also, agreed to teach boys of "manageable age." This was the beginning of St. John the Baptist School. It remained open for almost one hundred years.
Not long after the photos below were taken in 1956, the school buildings of St. John the Baptist were demolished to make way for the elevated Pontchartrain Expressway. However, the tradition of the school and the Dominican Sisters' work in the city lives on at St. Mary's Dominican High School. In 2000, when ground was broken for a new building for the school, soil was transported from the former site of St. John the Baptist School at Dryades and Calliope Streets, from the St. Charles Avenue campus of St. Mary's Dominican, and from Cabra, Ireland, home of the first Dominican Nuns who came to New Orleans, to pay tribute to the school's history.
St. John the Baptist Church remains. This church building was constructed in 1872, designed by architect, Albert Diettel and built by Irish contractor, Thomas Mulligan.
I received a note from Fred Bullinger saying that, when fund-raising for the church's construction was underway, his g-grandparents donated their jewelry to the building fund. He, also, wrote that Fr. Screen had the steeple gold-plated with funds from the sale of the school. Nancy Brister |
