Mount de Sales Academy

Mount de Sales is the first academy in Baltimore County that offered formal education to young women of all denominations. Sisters of the Visitation had established an academy in Baltimore County in 1837 at the request of Most Reverend Samuel Eccleston, the young fifth archbishop of Baltimore. At the Reverend’s prompting, the Sisters of the Visitation bought land in Catonsville in 1850 for a county school that could accommodate boarders. The land was acquired by Mother Mary Cecelia Brooks in her own name from William T. Somerville. The Sisters had received a bequest from a colleague in New York that was the precise amount needed to cover the cost of the school’s site. The money was received on August 15 – a Catholic holy day – and was spent by the 20th to purchase the seventy-six-acre site. The digging of the Academy’s cellar began on January 29, 1851, and the cornerstone was laid in May of 1851 by Bishop Charbonnel. Twelve Sisters were assigned to the Academy from the Visitation Convent in Georgetown, D.C., and they arrived via Baltimore on August 11, 1852.

Students at the Mount de Sales Academy included young women and girls from Protestant and Jewish families, as well as Catholics, and girls from Latin America and the West Indies, as well as various regions of the United States. Enrollment plummeted during the Civil War since Catholicism was a largely Southern phenomenon prior to the age of immigration. One 1871 graduate of the Academy was Mary Pinkney Hardy, who later grew to be the mother of General Douglas MacArthur. She was graduated with the highest honors at the Academy and received a gold medal for excellence in conduct. Since life and career choices for women were limited in the mid-nineteenth century, those who came to Mount de Sales to live as nuns were drawn from diverse areas. The 1860 census lists forty-nine nuns from four countries and six states. 

Gradually, the institution became more day school than boarding academy and in 1933, the boarding school was discontinued. Finally, in 1979, the Sisters, many of whom were of advanced years, gave the school up and left the monastery. The school continues under the management of a board of directors and the educational function has passed to a group of Dominican Sisters. 

Mount de Sales Academy, National Register of Historic Places. Accessed December 15th 2020. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/106776314.

Mount de Sales Academy (Catonsville, Maryland), Wikipedia. Accessed January 21st 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_de_Sales_Academy_(Catonsville,_Maryland).