Come North, the Life-Story of Mother Xavier Ross
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Come North! The Life of Mother Xavier Ross, Foundress of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Sister Julia Gilmore, S. C. L. Sister Julia Gihnore, S.. C. L. ?· '$3.50 Come North! By Sister Julia Gilmore, S.C.L. Come North I is a tribute to Mother Xavier Ross, foundress of the Sis ters of Charity of Leavenworth, and pioneer in the fields of religion and education. It is the happy record of a life of vibrant faith, ardent devoti6n, clear vision, and quiet endurance, the story of a woman who played a leading role in the great drama of the develop ment of the Midwest and even the Far West. The gauge of a person's greatness may be told in terms of what he overcomes. Just so, this biography reveals an outstanding spiritual personality that overcame much and in the overcoming became greater. There were red-letter days (Continued on back flap) r r r COME NORTH! The Life-Story of Mother Xavier Ross Valiant Pioneer and Foundress of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth I 1 j 1 Mother Xavier Ross COME NORTH! The Life - Story of Mother Xavier Ross Foundress of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth ~y SISTER JULIA GILMORE, S.C.L. Illustrations by Patricia DeBuck • New York McMULLEN BOOKS, INC. 1951 NIHIL OBSTAT: LOUIS s. HAUBER Censor librorum IMPRIMATUR: ~ GEo.J.DoNNELLY Bishop of Kansas City in Kansas Kansas City, Kansas April 26, 1948 Copyright, 1951 McMULLEN BooKs, !Ne. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. AT THE POLYGON PRESS, INC. • BROOKLYN TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Backdrop for Greatness 1 2 "One Thing I Have Asked" 19 3. Voveo 29 4. Came a Volunteer 37 5. "I Have Planted, Apollo Watered" 48 6. God Gives the Increase 56 7. The Nashville Story 64 8. "Come North!" 77 9. Marching into Tomorrow 86 10 With Kickapoo Street the Destination 93 11. What Was Their Happiness ! 106 12. Behind the Curtain: Drama 119 13. "The Peaceable Had a Vineyard" 136 14. The Foundress Builds a House 148 15. Not without Travail 165 16. Yet-Thabor Came 172 17. The Great Blackrobe Pleads 182 18. All the Land Made Desolate 192 19. What Is Past Is Prologue 205 20. "They That Instruct Many to Justice 214 21. Shadows Retire 241 APPENDICES A. Letters Written by Mother Xavier 249 B. Letters Written to Mother Xavier 266 C. Tributes to Mother Xavier 271 D. Other Source Materia1 280 Bibliography 295 Notes 301 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOR THE GRACIOUSNESS I HAVE MET AND THE HELP I HAVE received in gathering data for this work I express my sincere thanks to the many whose assistance is indicated in the appen dices and the bibliography. In this way I hope to include all without possibility of omission Major indebtedness, however, must first be acknowledged to Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Greenlease of Kansas City for their generous assistance, and to the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky, for their cordial hospitality and indispensable aid in the use of their archives. Next, I am beholden to the archivists of the Missouri and Chicago Provinces of the Society of Jesus for letting me consult their available material relative to Mother Xavier, and to the Reverend Francis M. Wilson, S.J., of the Jesuit Mission Band, Chicago, for invaluable collaborative as sistance. Then, the Reverend Julian A. Garrity, S.J., pastor of St. Francis Xavier Church, Cincinnati, was unsparing of him self in his efforts to locate vital documents for me; and the late Reverend Jean Delanglez, S.J., of the Institute of Jesuit History, Loyola University, Chicago, concerned himself meticulously with the finished manuscript, giving numerous valuable suggestions of which I was glad to avail myself in this work. Appreciation is also due Mrs. Flora Dalton, Manhattan, Kansas, for the use of her mother's copybook, and The Leaven worth Times for the use of its files. The State Librarian and Archivist of Nashville, Tennessee, Mrs. John Trotwood Moore, was most courteous and helpful in her capacity, as were the Reverend J. R. Coffey, O.P., of the Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D. C., and the Reverend John R. Lyons, archivist of the Louisville Diocese. Mr. W. J. Burton, Assistant Chief Engineer of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, was no less helpful in allowing me to refer to him on specific points regard ing early railroads and ferries. The thirty-four members of my own Community, the Insti tute of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, who knew Mother Xavier personally, deserve my special gratitude. They, as well as our Foundress' former available students, gave generously of their time in reminiscences and advice. Sister Mary Mark Orr, Librarian of the Saint Mary College, Xavier, Kansas, together with her assistants, Margaret Heckethorn and Ruth Considine, capably and gladly helped me locate material, while Mother Mary Francesca O'Shea and our present Mother General, Mother Mary Ancilla Spoor, gave _strong and sure impetus to the completion of the work. To each, I am grateful. Mother Xavier, herself, it can be confidently hoped, will repa,y them by her intercession. TO THE MOTHER OF GOD A COMMUNITY'S GRATITUDE Entrance to Convent 1. BACKDROP FOR GREATNESS CINCINNATI WAS ALREADY CALLING HERSELF "THE QUEEN CITY of the West" when Ann Ross was born there on November 17, 1813. Her father, Richard Ross, was a Methodist preacher. Her mother, Elizabeth Taylor Ross, bore the title "class leader," which entailed the double task of supervising classes of proba tioners, giving care and instruction, as well as dealing with full fledged members of the Methodist Church for facilitating the collection of church funds. Mr. and Mrs: Ross had left Penn sylvania in the early l 800s in. answer to the first call of the West. Whether Ann's two older brothers were born in Penn~ylvania or in Cincinnati is a point of information lost to posterity. There were five children in the family: Joseph, Philip, Taylor, Ann, · and Eunice.1 At the time of Ann's birth, the country was just taking its first steps: ploughs were beginning to break the gumbo of the Missis sippi bottoms; Conestoga wagons were creaking along Indiana's corduroy trails; every keelboat drifting down the Ohio with its deckload of children, chickens, and family wash was to be broken up and rebuilt into a settler's cabin; while out through Virginia was creeping a turnpike surfaced by the new bound-.,tone' method 1 invented in England by John McAdam. America was in the building, and Cincinnati was youthfully important. Besides its pork-packing establishments, which were set up with small regard for the sensibilities of the community and which gave it the nickname "Porkopolis," breweries and distilleries were adding a lucrative export, and pork had brought in the by product industries of button-making and soap manufacture. Cincinnati was a river town, always harboring a floating popu lation of roustabouts, gamblers, sharpers, and other questionable characters. Moreover, the slaughter-houses attracted a violent type of man. As a result, in the coffee-houses ( glorified titles for barrooms and by Ann's father called "doggeries") lurked a mob, the more dreadful because it was often silently supported by in dustrial and political powers. There was an aesthetic side, too, to Cincinnati, where houses were of brick and stone, built solidly for the future. The streets ran at right angles to each other and were wide and well paved. But in spite of schools, lawyers, doctors, a night watch, a volunteer fire department, hotels, and weekly mails by stage, steamboat, and post riders, Cincinnati at heart and in spirit was a frontier town built by pioneers.2 Possibly through the contagion of ex ample, Ann caught the pioneers' spirit and courage, which she showed in a marked degree in later life. Long years after leaving Cincinnati, she could recall how, in the growing town, board piles afforded the best possible place for playing "hide-and-seek" -and unparalleled opportunities for falling and scraping one's infant shins. She was the adventurous one of the group, her unspoken motto being "Excelsior," her skull apparently being made of unbreakable material, and her arms and legs of India rubber. Winter, with snow-balling and coasting downhill, and long evenings before the open fire, popping corn and roasting apples, was the delight of her childhood. A joyous remembrance was that of the making of ice cream for Saturday afternoon parties: snow, milk, sugar, and vanilla stirred 2 together and partaken of immediately after mixing-blissfully unaware that later generations would pronounce this mixture crowded with poisonous microbes. She remembered, too, that sometimes, as a child, she and her brothers might flit down the street over the spectral snow to a church different from her father's and crowd in with the other children of the neighborhood to marvel at the lights and the home-made gilt star hanging over the altar. If her father dis covered this treason, he was not too severe about it, secretly gratified, perhaps, that it supplied him an easy theme for a sermon, convicting the Catholics of their error; for he could prove beyond dispute that the primitive Christians never cele brated Christmas with a crib, and, secondly, that Christ was not born anywhere near the twenty-fifth of December.3 It may have been this calculated, restrained attitude of her father that made Ann's mother remark to her once when Ann had grown to young womanhood, "I doubt if your father ever had much religion, for I have never yet heard him shout." And Ann, after she had become Mother Xavier, when telling of this saying of her mother's, would add, "And I never felt any inclination to shout until after I had become a Catholic."4 The father by long discourses drilled his children in close listening and logical thinking, yet the man who could be so interminably dull in the pulpit was chief magician in the en chantment which Ann felt lay over her childhood home.