![\"Image](\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/files\/2025\/04\/KD-Artwork-with-Newspaper.png\")
<\/a>Main: “Display Opens” The Catholic Witness, L.2001.011.023, CCHS Archives, (Carlisle, PA). Corner: “Mother Katharine Drexel depicted with the Native Americans she was canonized for helping,” Bucks County Courier Times, [WEB<\/a>].<\/p><\/div>\n When you hear \u201carchives\u201d you probably think of a dim room with tables and shelves and filing cabinets. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Church or Father Henry Ganss, with whom she worked closely in Carlisle.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n “‘St. Katharine’s Hall’ Title Page,” 973.0497 R684s, Dickinson Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College Library.<\/p><\/div>\n Before coming into the Dickinson Archives, I emailed first to ask if they had any materials related to Katharine Drexel, St. Katharine\u2019s Hall, or anything else connected to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t the primary source I had hoped for, but they did have a photocopy of a 150-page unpublished manuscript, St. Katharine\u2019s Hall: Carlise, Pennsylvania\u2014The Unfolding Apostolate of The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament 1906-1918<\/em>, written by Sister M. Georgianna Rockwell of the SBS in the 1980s as an independent research project on the group\u2019s founder.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n 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\u2019t have the same feel<\/em> to them that the original or an actual artifact would.<\/p>\n “Folders at CCHS” Katharine Drexel Materials, CCHS<\/p><\/div>\n 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<\/em>, a digital subscription newspaper database, meaning that even as they were not primary sources, they were items I could not have accessed otherwise.<\/p>\n In the whole folder, I only found one document from the early 20th<\/sup> century: a photocopy of a two-paragraph article from The Red Man<\/em>, the Carlisle Indian School Newspaper, saying that Drexel was visiting Carlisle in 1911. It recounted Drexel\u2019s visit and praised her generosity in financial donations towards Indian Schools across the nation.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n Though not from the time of Drexel, other items showed great promise, too. Rockwell\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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\u2019s voice from the way she wrote in her letters.<\/p>\n “Letter to the SBS,” Katharine Drexel, in “Used Trumpets,” L2013.037.002, CCHS Archives.<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cWhere do you think your Mother and Mother Mary James are, on this 29th<\/sup> of Jan?\u201d she opens her 1898 letter to her \u201cdear daughters in the Blessed Sacrament.\u201d After answering her own question she continues in a similar style, \u201cWell, why did we go to Carlisle? Let me tell you.\u201d 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]<\/a> \u00a0Sister Charlotte, in a 1987 interview, expands upon this warm, bubbly picture of Drexel as a person. Sister Charlotte recounted a time when Drexel\u2019s watch broke before a trip and she opted \u201cto carry a large alarm clock on the train.\u201d Though the sisters eventually persuaded her to borrow a watch instead, the story shows Drexel\u2019s affinity for simplicity and humility.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n For this reason that she remarks fondly on how \u201cplain and practical\u201d everything at the Indian School was in her 1898 letter. Specifically, Drexel admits that she \u201cwas prepared to see something very grand and was agreeably disappointed\u201d by the plainness.[6]<\/a> I wonder if she expected something \u201cvery grand\u201d 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.<\/p>\n “Just Two Miracles from Sainthood,” Bucks County Courier Times, photocopy, in Katharine Drexel Collection, L16.0083, CCHS Archives.<\/p><\/div>\n 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\u2019t 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]<\/a><\/p>\n [1]<\/a> \u201cArchives,\u201d Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament<\/em>, accessed April 10, 2025, [WEB<\/a>].<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Georgianna Rockwell, \u201cSt. Katharine\u2019s Hall Carlisle, Pennsylvania \u2013 The Unfolding Apostolate of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament \u2013 1906-1918,\u201d 973.0497 R684s, Photocopy of unpublished manuscript, Dickinson Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College Library<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> \u201cMother M. Katharine Drexel Visits Carlisle,\u201d The Red Man<\/em>, February 1911, vol. 3, no. 6, 307, photocopy, in Katharine Drexel Collection, L16.0083, Cumberland County Historical Society Archives, (Carlisle, PA).<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Katharine Drexel to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1898, in \u201cUsed Trumpets: The Letters of Blessed Katharine Drexel SBS and Reverend Doctor Hanry G. Ganss 1892-1912,\u201d L2013.037.002, Cumberland County Historical Society Archives, (Carlisle, PA): 19-21.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> \u201cMother Drexel: Just Two Miracles Away from Sainthood\u201d Bucks County Courier Times<\/em>, 2 February 1987, photocopy of excerpt, in Katharine Drexel Collection, L16.0083, Cumberland County Historical Society Archives, (Carlisle, PA).<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Drexel to SBS.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Zachary M. Schrag, \u201cHistorians\u2019 Ethics.\u201d In\u00a0The Princeton Guide to Historical Research,<\/em> (Princeton University Press, NJ, 2021): 24\u201336, [JSTOR<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Looking Past the Veil: Finding Katharine Drexel in the Archives When you hear \u201carchives\u201d you probably think of a dim room with tables and shelves and filing cabinets. It\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-204pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>