Author: Evangeline Clausson

Looking Past the Veil: Finding Katharine Drexel in the Archives

When you hear “archives” you probably think of a dim room with tables and shelves and filing cabinets. It’s quiet. You can sit there and rummage through boxes of old documents, uncovering their secrets. Often though, a trip to the archives will look more like mine this past last week but wait to judge. Just because the room is bright and you and handed a folder of modern documents, that does not mean there is not something to learn.

I set out to find primary sources related to Katharine Drexel and her work in Carlisle in local archives. I knew that most of Katharine Drexel’s personal documents and correspondence were kept in the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Philadelphia Archdiocese, but I still hoped there might be a document, letter, or something else that she had actually held left in Carlisle having been in possession of St. Patrick’s Church or Father Henry Ganss, with whom she worked closely in Carlisle.[1]

Before coming into the Dickinson Archives, I emailed first to ask if they had any materials related to Katharine Drexel, St. Katharine’s Hall, or anything else connected to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament’s presence in Carlisle. The Dickinson Archives focus predominantly on archiving the history of the college, though they also have some materials related to the Carlisle Indian School, so I was hopeful that they might have something related to Drexel.

It wasn’t the primary source I had hoped for, but they did have a photocopy of a 150-page unpublished manuscript, St. Katharine’s Hall: Carlise, Pennsylvania—The Unfolding Apostolate of The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament 1906-1918, written by Sister M. Georgianna Rockwell of the SBS in the 1980s as an independent research project on the group’s founder.[2]

Preservation can be challenging and expensive. Photocopies mean that more archives can have the same information kept and more cheaply, which is why I could read another photocopy of the same manuscript at the Cumberland County Historical Society [CCHS] two days later, though they don’t have the same feel to them that the original or an actual artifact would.

I had a similar experience at the CCHS archives. When I came in for my research appointment, they had pulled the aforementioned manuscript, and three folders of material for me. A cursory glance of the materials told me everything was a photocopy or an original article written between the 1980s-2000s, most of which honored her for being named blessed in 1988 and then sainted in 2000. Many of them had been printed from Newspapers.com, a digital subscription newspaper database, meaning that even as they were not primary sources, they were items I could not have accessed otherwise.

In the whole folder, I only found one document from the early 20^th century: a photocopy of a two-paragraph article from The Red Man, the Carlisle Indian School Newspaper, saying that Drexel was visiting Carlisle in 1911. It recounted Drexel’s visit and praised her generosity in financial donations towards Indian Schools across the nation.[3]

Though not from the time of Drexel, other items showed great promise, too. Rockwell’s manuscript was a rare item with a rich bibliography citing letters, church annals, newspapers, etc., and one of the folders had a similar style manuscript titled Used Trumpets: The Letters of Blessed Katharine Drexel SBS and Reverend Doctor Hanry G. Ganss 1892-1912, which largely consisted of transcribed letters from Drexel and Ganss. Obviously for a project like this, the original letters would be preferred, but the information was still valid, and I now had statistics from the school and a sense of Drexel’s voice from the way she wrote in her letters.

“Where do you think your Mother and Mother Mary James are, on this 29^th of Jan?” she opens her 1898 letter to her “dear daughters in the Blessed Sacrament.” After answering her own question she continues in a similar style, “Well, why did we go to Carlisle? Let me tell you.” She goes on to explain how and why she came to Carlisle and the prospects of setting up a convent in Carlisle to help educate the Catholic students at the Indian School.[4]  Sister Charlotte, in a 1987 interview, expands upon this warm, bubbly picture of Drexel as a person. Sister Charlotte recounted a time when Drexel’s watch broke before a trip and she opted “to carry a large alarm clock on the train.” Though the sisters eventually persuaded her to borrow a watch instead, the story shows Drexel’s affinity for simplicity and humility.[5]

For this reason that she remarks fondly on how “plain and practical” everything at the Indian School was in her 1898 letter. Specifically, Drexel admits that she “was prepared to see something very grand and was agreeably disappointed” by the plainness.[6] I wonder if she expected something “very grand” because of the government, military, or Protestant influences at the school. Moreover, this comment gives Drexel an air of feistiness that seems so contrary to her occupation. Its easy to imagine a nun being humble, but its harder to imagine a nun being excited, a bit silly, or even a little saucy at times, and yet Drexel feels so much more real in these anecdotes than she does in most of hagiographic or academic sources I looked at before.

My trip to the archives was not what I had expected, and neither was Katharine Drexel. Some part of me wants archives and nuns to remain stuffy and old, but my research would be hollow and sorely lacking if I hadn’t had this experience. After all, learning to move past biases and tell a full story, driven by empathy and curiosity is the job of a historian.[7]

[1] “Archives,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed April 10, 2025, [WEB].

[2] Georgianna Rockwell, “St. Katharine’s Hall Carlisle, Pennsylvania – The Unfolding Apostolate of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament – 1906-1918,” 973.0497 R684s, Photocopy of unpublished manuscript, Dickinson Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College Library

[3] “Mother M. Katharine Drexel Visits Carlisle,” The Red Man, February 1911, vol. 3, no. 6, 307, photocopy, in Katharine Drexel Collection, L16.0083, Cumberland County Historical Society Archives, (Carlisle, PA).

[4] Katharine Drexel to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1898, in “Used Trumpets: The Letters of Blessed Katharine Drexel SBS and Reverend Doctor Hanry G. Ganss 1892-1912,” L2013.037.002, Cumberland County Historical Society Archives, (Carlisle, PA): 19-21.

[5] “Mother Drexel: Just Two Miracles Away from Sainthood” Bucks County Courier Times, 2 February 1987, photocopy of excerpt, in Katharine Drexel Collection, L16.0083, Cumberland County Historical Society Archives, (Carlisle, PA).

[6] Drexel to SBS.

[7] Zachary M. Schrag, “Historians’ Ethics.” In The Princeton Guide to Historical Research, (Princeton University Press, NJ, 2021): 24–36, [JSTOR].

Katharine Drexel: Founder, Philanthropist, Prisoner?

Combing through genealogical databases requires a positive attitude, a keen eye, and a sense of humor. The positive attitude is to keep you motivated when information and sources are scarce, of poor quality, or little obvious use; the keen eye is for finding useful and interesting items; and the sense of humor is for maintaining your positive attitude when your mistakes or the inadequacy (or inaccuracy) of sources begins to get you down.
I knew if I wanted to find documents pertaining to Mother (Mary) Katharine Drexel in her youth I would have to use her name prior to her taking vows: Catherine Mary Drexel, which is what I put into Ancestry.com.[1] I tried a few other spelling variations, using vs. omitting her middle name, etc. but many of the results were obituaries behind a paywall from Newspapers.com or false positives: both her names were incredibly common, even just within the Drexel family. It felt like an agonizing game of trial and error for what combination of name spelling and degree of exactness I should search with. Moreover, I didn’t want to limit it to Philadelphia or PA, lest I miss anything from while she was living or visiting elsewhere, though eventually I changed my tune and found greater success.
I took a brief pause and looked at ProQuest and a few other niche databases such as Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920’s, looking for newspaper articles on Drexel, specifically for personal articles, obituaries, etc. My favorite find was her petition to Roosevelt to sign the Anti-Lynching bill, but this and similar items were less suited to this assignment which focuses more on genealogy, though I can still use this in later research, so it’s not a loss.[2]
I should admit that the whole time I was really hoping to find a birth certificate or baptism record to prove her birth name, so that was my focus when I returned to Ancestry. Instead of putting “Catherine Drexel” into the search though, I put in her father’s name, “Francis Anthony Drexel.” Francis’ name should be with hers on censuses until his death, as well as on birth records and so on, but could come up better in searches, so it seemed worth a try. This brought me three more census results, two for 1870 and one for 1880, which had M. Katharine listed as Katie and Catharine. Alas, still no birth record, so I returned to trying variants of Kate and Catherine.

Often when these documents get digitized, AI or other programs are used to read the (sometimes hardly legible) handwriting. On the 1930 census, the AI interpreted “President” as “Prisoner”—certainly not the role you would expect for a saintly nun, but a good reminder to not only read the transcripts.[3] Others were more mild, tagging “Catharine” as “Cathaine” or “Drexel” as “Dregel.”[4] Some of these were then manually tagged with “(Mother) Katharine Drexel” but others were not and could have easily been missed without broadening the search to similar results, especially as without misreadings, her name was recorded as Katie, Catharine, Katharine, and Catherine, occasionally with an “M.” added for “Mary.”[5]

Then I found Kate M Drexel’s passport application. Kate was born May 15^th, 1861, three years after Mother Katharine (November 26^th, 1858), as per the SBS website.[6] I would have written it off quickly as a relative with a similar name, but attached to it was a note asking for passports for Kate M, Elizabeth L, and Lousie B, the same names and middle initials of the three daughters of Francis A Drexel both as per secondary sources and as in the census records.[7] The application also featured a description of Kate, which seems to match Mother Katharine pretty well, specifically “large” referring to her nose and “round” for her chin.[8] But for this passport to be hers, either the birthdate must be false, or her birthdate elsewhere must be false, which is unlikely as Katharine’s mother died the month following her birth.[9]

Now I really wanted to find a birth certificate. While I thoroughly doubted that her mother’s death was miss recorded or that she was actually the daughter of her father’s second wife, I wanted certainty. Census records show Katharine’s age matching a 1858 birth give or take one year—not three—pointing to a false passport application. Ancestry evidently did not have Katharine’s birth certificate or baptism record. I went back to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament website in hopes they had cited something, but all the Archives page had was an announcement that they moved their archives in 2017 to the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.[10] However, the biography section noted that Francis Drexel married his second wife, Emma Bouvier, in Old St. Joseph’s church.[11] It seemed possible that if they were married there, that Katharine was baptized there, too.

St. Joseph’s website had a similar message to the SBS website, however, it had links to the digitized collections put together by the Archdiocese’ Catholic Historical Research Center and the genealogical research service FindMyPast.[12] Dickinson does not pay for a subscription to this service, but I was able to make a free account, which strictly limited my access, but I was lucky, and my first search brought me directly to the baptism and birth record of Mother Katharine, dating her birth to “Nov 26, 1858.” Though, troublingly, it’s hard to make out if her name is Catharine or Catherine.[13] Still, I am amazed by how far things came from dead ends and false positives to dozens of documents, future research topics, and a genuine excitement to find more. First on my mind is answering why the false birthday on the passport application or was there another Kate M Drexel just three years younger than the Catholic saint going abroad with the saint’s sisters the same year the saint was meeting the Pope in Rome?[14]

[1] “Katharine Drexel,” Wikipedia, March 23, 2025, [WEB].

[2] “Requests that Franklin D. Roosevelt Promote Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill.” In Department of Justice Classified Subject Files on Civil Rights, 1914-1949; Department of Justice General Records, Entry 112-B, Straight Numerical Files, #158260, 1934. [ProQuest].

[3] 1930 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “M Katherine Dregel,” [Ancestry].

[4] 1880 United States Census, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Cathaine Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1930 US Census.

[5] 1870 United States Census, Philadelphia, Ward 08, District 23, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Katie Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1870 United States Census, Philadelphia, Ward 08, District 23 (2^nd enum), Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catharine Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1880 US Census.

[6] “St. Katharine Drexel,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed March 27, 2025, [WEB].

[7] “St. Katharine Drexel,” SBS; 1870 US Census; 1870 US Census (2^nd enum); 1880 US Census; 1900 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Katharine M Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1910 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catharine M Dorexel,” [Ancestry]; 1920 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Mother M Katharine Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1930 US Census; 1940 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catherine Dresel,” [Ancestry]; 1950 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catherine M Drexel,” [Ancestry].

[8] U.S. Passport Applications 1795-1925, July 1886, digital image s.v. “Kate M Drexel,” [Ancestry].

[9] “Hannah Jane Langstroth Drexel,” Find a Grave, accessed March 27, 2025, [WEB]; “St. Katharine Drexel,” SBS.

[10] “Archives,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed March 27, 2025, [WEB].

[11] “St. Katharine Drexel,” SBS.

[12] “Genealogy,” Old Saint Joseph’s Church, 2023, [WEB].

[13] “Philadelphia Roman Catholic Parish Baptisms,” Philadelphia, Philadelphia South, Pennsylvania, 1858, FindMyPast, [FindMyPast].

[14] “St. Katharine Drexel” SBS.

St. Katharine’s Hall Wayside Marker

It’s a crisp February day, and the sun is finally showing its face again. In the sunlight, it feels almost like spring. A brisk walk from campus, with admittedly a few wrong turns, brought me to St. Katharine’s Hall and the wayside marker in front commemorating the site. Situated beside the old St. Patrick’s Church, now called the Shrine Church, is the hall built at the directive of Katharine Drexel, as a location for teaching the Native Americans at the Carlisle Indian School. [1]

Drexel was born in 1858 as the heir to an incredibly rich and prominent family in Philadelphia. She was raised firmly in the Roman Catholic faith. After her father’s passing in 1885, Drexel and her sisters inherited his $15 million-dollar estate.[2] In 1889, Drexel made her monastic vows, adding the additional vow to be a “mother and servant of the Indian and Negro races” which is quoted on the marker in front of her hall in Carlisle. [3] Using her immense wealth, Drexel traveled about the nation funding, promoting, and teaching at schools for Black and Native American children.[4] St. Katharine’s Hall in Carlisle was one of these schools.

Being far more familiar with the more infamous legacy of the Indian boarding schools, generally hearing about them in the context of phrases like “cultural genocide,” “forced assimilation,” or, worse yet, with Captain Pratt’s quote “kill the Indian and save the man,” I was instantly perturbed by what I saw as benign platitudes on the wayside marker.[5] I immediately painted Drexel as the stereotypical cruel nun, with high standards and harsh punishments, paired with images of Native students being taken from their families and having their hair cut forcibly. Not a pretty picture—nor an accurate one.

Drexel was certainly guilty of a “White Savior” bias, believing that she was “saving souls” particularly, she said “‘in the case of a pagan people, [where] the children may carry into the home the lessons of faith and morality’” taught at the schools she funded.[6] For this reason though, she favored building schools on reservations, allowing students to stay with their families. Some Native communities recall her mission sites as “places of abuse and neglect,” while others are considered “models of cooperation and cultural enrichment.”[7] Though none of these schools were nearly so infamously problematic as the Carlisle Industrial school.[8] It is also worth noting that despite the way it sounds from the marker, she did not actually work at the Carlisle Indian School itself, rather at the hall bearing her name where she provided only religious education to specifically the Catholic students at the Indian School, which was otherwise Protestant affiliated.[9] The “Select Free Colored School” and many of her other schools provided academic education primarily with religious and moral education as well.[10]

While some would argue that her bias alone makes her a participant in culturicide, I would argue that she was more so a bystander to the attempted eradication of the Native American culture, having worked so near to schools like the Carlisle Indian School, allowing them to commit abuses. Still, in the 21^st century there is a hesitance to honor individuals involved with the Carlisle Indian School or the early 20^th century Indian education initiative in general because of the stains of racism and abuse on the initiative as a whole. However, this marker was put up by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament—which was founded by St. Katharine—not a government or secular organization, making it seem less out of place.[11]

The marker looks remarkably similar to those put up by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, though. (See the image of St. Patrick’s Church marker for reference.)[12] Both are dark blue, rectangular, with a flourish at the top, etc. The one for St. Katharine’s Hall has a different insignia on top, though, because it is not a state ordained marker, as those by the Commission are. Other historical markers in Carlisle that aren’t put up by the state come in different colors or shapes to differentiate themselves, such as the “Hot-Chee Dogs” marker by the Hamilton Restaurant.[13] The marker for St. Katharine’s Hall seems to be attempting to emulate the official historical markers, as though by doing so it presents itself with greater authority and importance.

It may seem that up to this point, I have neglected Drexel’s service to the African American community as noted on the marker. That is because I wanted to end on a wholly positive note. This marker clearly wanted to remember the good work that Drexel did in her life. It instantly led me to skepticism because of its proximity to and mention of the infamous Indian School. While her involvement with Indian schools is checkered, her work with the African American community could be called patronizing at the worst. She stood up for anti-lynching bills, fought against racial profiling, and she educated Black youths without expecting their conversion to Catholicism in return. Being positioned across the street from Carlisle’s historic Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, it’s a pity the marker didn’t give greater emphasis on Drexel’s egalitarian work.[14]

Coming at the marker with so much historical, emotional baggage, I felt that the wording of the marker was trying to praise someone with their flowery vow to conceal the reality of their work. Whereas, in reality, the marker’s use of her monastic vow is problematic for an entirely different reason: the vow was spoken before she had actually done the service to the Black and Native American communities, so it fails to really convey the full depth of her service. I wish instead it spoke plainly to her devotion to education and equality, admitting where at times it was misguided but using that to emphasize her opinions on equality that were actually quite progressive at the time. Ironically, a more secular and nuanced marker would paint Drexel as more of a saint than the current one because readers would find it more believable and be able to more fully honor and commemorate her for the truly impressive human that she was.

 

[1] “About Us—St. Patrick Church,” St. Patrick Church, Carlisle, last modified 2020, accessed February 28, 2025, [WEB]; Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (S.B.S.), “St. Katharine’s Hall,” marker (Carlisle, PA).

[2] Amanda Bresie, “Mother Katharine Drexel’s Benevolent Empire: The Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions and the Education of Native Americans, 1885–1935,” in Remapping the History of Catholicism in the United States, ed. David J. Endres, Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 72,  [JSTOR]; “St. Katharine Drexel,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed March 2, 2025, [WEB].  

[3] Rachel Bulman, “‘Think It, Desire It, Speak It, Act It’: St. Katharine Drexel on Racial Equality,” Word on Fire, March 3, 2021, [WEB]; S.B.S., “St. Katharine’s Hall”

[4] Bresie, “Mother Katharine Drexel’s Benevolent Empire,” 71-94; Bulman, “‘Think it, Desire It, Speak It, Act It’”

[5] Arnold Krupat, “Introduction,” in Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian School Students Speak, (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) xiv-xv, [JSTOR].

[6] Bresie, “Mother Katharine Drexel’s Benevolent Empire,” 92.

[7] Bresie, “Mother Katharine Drexel’s Benevolent Empire,” 93-94.

[8] Krupat, “Introduction,” xiii-xxx.

[9] Amanda West, “St. Patrick Church and the Indian School” Dickinson College Wiki, last modified December 13, 2007, 00:18 [WEB].

[10] Elisabeth Davis, “‘Our Colored and Indian Charges Furnish So Much Amusement for Us’: Catholicism, Assimilation, and the Racial Hierarchy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1883–1918,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 91, no. 1 (2024): 47–64. [Scholarly Publishing Collective]

[11] S.B.S., “St. Katharine’s Hall”

[12] Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Comission, “St. Patrick’s Church” marker, Carlisle, PA, 1986.

[13] Shane Oliver, “Hot-Chee Dogs,” Historical Marker Database, last updated July 12, 2022, updated by Carl Gordon Moore Jr., [WEB].

[14] Bulman, “‘Think It, Desire It, Speak It, Act It’; Davis, “‘Our Colored and Indian Charges’”; For more on the Bethel A.M.E. Church’s history see “200 Years of History” Bethel AME Carlisle, 2025, [WEB].