Katherine Drexel Founds Schools for Native Americans

Dust rose from the wagon ruts as the crates slid to the ground. I steadied one marked “slates” and watched the adobe walls of the old mission house catch the late light. Katharine Drexel stood a few paces off, notebook open, counting each bundle herself. She wore a plain traveling coat and asked the driver the exact weight of the chalk boxes before she signed the receipt.

Word had reached us months earlier that a Philadelphia heiress meant to open a school for Pueblo children right here in Santa Fe. Most of us had heard such promises before. Supplies arrived, then the money stopped. This time the crates kept coming.

She walked the single room twice, measuring the distance from window to door with her own stride. Then she sent a telegram to her sister in the East asking for another two hundred dollars for benches. The answer came back the same day. The benches were ordered before supper.

Three weeks later four young women in plain black arrived on the afternoon stage. They carried their own trunks. Katharine met them at the edge of the plaza and led them straight to the mission house. By evening the first class list was posted on the door. Twenty names, all Pueblo, all under twelve.

I helped carry water from the acequia that first month. The sisters rose before light and scrubbed the floor twice because the children tracked in red dust. Katharine kept the accounts in a ledger she locked each night. She wrote every supplier herself, asking for lower freight rates and quoting the exact distance from the railhead.

One afternoon she read a letter aloud to the sisters. It was from Rome. The Pope had told her to become the missionary herself. She folded the paper, placed it inside the ledger, and said only that Bishop O’Connor would advise her. The room stayed quiet until the bell rang for the children.

By the second year the enrollment reached sixty. Katharine paid the teacher salaries out of her own portion of the inheritance. She refused to draw interest on the principal, saying the money had already been lent once. When a federal agent offered to place the school under government contract she declined, keeping the daily schedule under her own hand.

I left Santa Fe for a season and returned in the spring of 1891. The sisters had moved into a larger building. Katharine was no longer signing as Miss Drexel. She had taken vows on February 12 and now signed Mother M. Katharine. The new congregation was called the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Ten novices lived in the old family house near Philadelphia until the motherhouse at Cornwells Heights was finished.

She came back to Santa Fe that same year with four more sisters. They opened a second classroom and added a small infirmary. When money ran short for roof repairs she sold a parcel of Philadelphia property rather than cut the children’s rations. The ledgers showed the transaction in her own hand.