Celebrating Faith, Discovery, Leadership, and Community
Mount Saint Mary's commemorates its first 200 Years By Jay Schill
Photography by Jamie Turner In our society, the only certainty is constant change—exchanging a stale job for a fresh one, replacing a cramped home for a roomier one, swapping last year’s gadget for this year’s upgraded version. It is rare to hear about a steady presence—like the 200-year existence of one of Frederick County’s crown jewels, Mount Saint Mary’s University. Nestled in the lush Catoctin Mountains, Mount Saint Mary’s is one of the 40 oldest universities in America. Founded by a French priest during the infancy of our country, The Mount, as the university is called, has seen the great prosperity of boom years and the tremendous hardship of economic depression and war—one literally fought in its backyard. How did this small school, written off by some before it even came into existence, manage to survive? Only events that occurred more than two centuries before Mount Saint Mary’s unlikely beginning can answer that question.
“It’s amazing how improbable it all was,” marvels Stephen Whitman, a Mount Saint Mary’s history professor. Had Father John Dubois, a Roman Catholic priest, not fled France in 1791 and come to Virginia to escape religious persecution, Mount Saint Mary’s would never have become a reality. Three years after Dubois’s arrival, John Carroll, America’s first archbishop, appointed Father Dubois as the pastor of a parish in Frederick, Maryland and, when the Catholic English and Irish immigrants who settled in tiny Emmitsburg discovered themselves in need of a priest’s services, a university and seminary was established just south of the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.
The Birth of an Institution
Around the dawn of the 19th century, Father Dubois became captivated with the people and natural surroundings of the Emmitsburg area. Despite misgivings from John Carroll, the most powerful man in the American Catholic church, there was no stopping Dubois in his quest to found an institution of higher learning for young men. Carroll allegedly tried to dissuade Dubois from creating another Catholic college since Georgetown University had been established less than 10 years earlier in what would soon be Washington, D.C. Carroll did not believe that the two Catholic colleges could survive in such close proximity.
Today, two centuries of existence and the current flourishing of Mount Saint Mary’s prove that Archbishop Carroll under-estimated Dubois and the people of Emmitsburg. A stroll around The Mount today takes visitors past the oldest part of the tree-lined campus—“the Terrace,” a group of sturdy grey stone residence halls dating to 1828—by more modern buildings, and past ongoing construction of a residence hall to accommodate this school looking toward the future. For the 2007-2008 school year, the college offers more than 30 undergraduate degrees and has in excess of 2,100 graduate and undergraduate students on its rolls. The seminary is running at capacity. It is safe to say that the Mount is booming.
An Indelible Influence
In the early 1800s, however, the future of Mount Saint Mary’s was far from certain. As fate would have it, two extraordinary people—a young widow from New York named Elizabeth Ann Seton and a newly ordained French priest named Simon Brute—would influence Dubois and the path of the fledgling college. Seton arrived in the valley within a year of the founding of the school and seminary. She established a school for girls that would become St. Joseph’s, and Seton and Dubois became lifelong friends. Father Brute arrived in 1811 to assist Dubois with the more than 100 Mount Saint Mary’s students. Becoming close with Elizabeth Seton, Brute soon realized the divinity of America’s first native-born saint and he requested that Seton’s associates save all of her writings. Due to his foresight and life’s work, the Catholic Church is presently considering Brute for canonization into sainthood. Dubois would eventually be appointed the third bishop of New York, and in the 1830s, Father Brute was called upon to become the first bishop of what is now Indianapolis. Both men had left their indelible mark on the Mount.
From the 1830s through the Civil War, Father John McCaffrey was president of Mount Saint Mary’s and he provided continuity, though his tenure was certainly not without its dark times. In the first 50 years of Mount Saint Mary’s history, the college regrettably observed the established practice of slavery. The institution actually owned a number of slaves, some donated by students’ parents in exchange for tuition. By the end of the 1850s, however, the college had freed all those who were enslaved.
... To read the full story see the December issue. 
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