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The “pioneer” CDPs at Providence enjoy a 1951 Christmas meal in the Drought House dining room, with its ornate fireplace.
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| This is the third in a continuing series on the historic Drought House, undergoing restoration/renovation on the campus of Providence Catholic School. Earlier installments can be found here: Part 1 Part 2 |
By Carol Baass Sowa
Today's Catholic
This is the third in a continuing series on the historic Drought House, currently undergoing restoration/renovation on the campus of Providence Catholic School. Earlier installments covered the property’s connection with Texas history and construction of the mansion there in 1901 by Henry Patrick Drought and wife Ethel, an early civic and cultural leader of San Antonio.
SAN ANTONIO • The times called for a drastic change and Mother Angelique Ayres, superior general of the Congregation of Divine Providence, was up to the challenge. Since post-Civil War days, the sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence had been involved in education in Texas and the year 1950 found them, among other things, operating five small high schools in San Antonio that had progressively become harder to adequately staff and operate.
It was decided to combine students from the five schools (St. Mary’s, San Fernando, St. Henry’s, St. Joseph’s and St. Michael’s) into one facility for girls to be named Providence High School on property purchased next to the already existing Marianist high school for boys, Central Catholic. (“This might bring the right people together,” Mother Angelique was quoted as saying.) The 4.7 acres purchased for this purpose on North St. Mary’s had previously belonged to Henry P. and Ethel Drought, who had built their stately three-story mansion on this San Antonio River property in 1901.
After Ethel’s death in 1943, the home sat unoccupied for seven years, and an account by Sister Anna Marie Scott, CDP, tells of the sisters’ excitement at exploring their newly purchased property and the difficulty of making their way through dense overgrown vegetation to reach the 12-room house, with its many ornate fireplaces and impressive woodwork. Minor vandalism had taken place in the years the old home sat empty, but the sisters soon set about getting that repaired and adapting the house for use as a convent, while work commenced on their new school, being built where the Droughts’ stables once stood.
Sister Anna Marie recalled Mother Angelique admonishing the builder, as the fall opening date for the school drew near in 1951: “If this school is not ready, Mr. Joeris, the sisters will hold classes under the trees!” It was ready in time, and the house began a new life as a convent for 21 of the sisters who staffed the school.
Parlors on the first floor were subdivided into music studios, while the Droughts’ living room (or “informal room”) was converted into a chapel. The wall between Henry Drought’s bedroom and study (his hefty safe still in place) was removed to create a larger community room/workroom. The balconies and south porch were eventually walled in to provide additional space. None of the magnificent fireplaces were used, fearing possible fire hazard.
The first sisters who moved into the Drought House have many happy memories of those days. Sister Reparata Glenn, CDP, was Mother Angelique’s chauffeur during the renovation of the house and building of the school and would frequently drive her out to check how work was progressing.
A friendly little black dog was always on hand to greet their arrival and they assumed it belonged to the workmen. When the work was completed, however, the little dog remained. The sisters began to feed it and the students grew quite fond of it, being heartbroken when it later disappeared.
A collection was taken up to purchase a new dog as a mascot and watchdog for the school, with each student contributing a nickel. With the money collected, a black cocker spaniel puppy “with papers,” dubbed Nickels (Nikky, for short), was purchased and took up residence at the house and school.
“Nikky was quite a character,” recalls Sister Reparata. The dog was allowed in the classroom, as long as it was not distracting the students, and had a nose for sniffing out smuggled-in food. “Nikky could smell it, if they were eating in the class,” remembers Sister Joan Michele Rake, CDP, “and they just had to give it over to me.” Adds Sister Reparata, “Nikky was also good at stealing the students’ lunches — stole everything they had. It was OK, as long as it was Nikky!”
The two would bathe the dog on Saturdays in the house’s third floor bathroom. “To dry Nikky off,” recalls Sister Joan Michele, “we would go over to the school and throw a scrub brush.” One would get at one end of the hall and one at the other, while the dog, ears flopping, ran back and forth to catch it until thoroughly dry.
The Providence students, in awe of their teachers in their distinctive habits, might have been surprised at the merriment that sometimes took place behind the Drought House’s stately walls.
Sister Joan Michele recalls the Halloween she and Sister Paul Joseph Bridges, CDP, went up to the attic and made ghostly noises down the flue that opened into the house’s many fireplaces. “In cahoots” with them was their superior, Sister Consolata (Therese) Pousson, CDP, known for her sense of humor, who switched off the lights at the same time.
After the commotion in the rooms below subsided, they heard someone shout “I bet they’re in the attic!” so the pair quickly exited out a third floor window, closing it behind them, and sat on the roof where they could hear the surprised searchers find the attic empty. “What fools we mortals be when we’re young!” chuckles Sister Joan Michele.
Sister Jane Coles, CDP, (formerly Sister Alice Ann) was known for her tap dancing and recalls the Halloween she dressed up in a black suit with a phosphorescent skeleton painted on it to perform a unique “skeleton dance” for the sisters with lights turned off.
Sister Kathryn Keefe, CDP (formerly Sister Mary Michael), remembers the celebration of special birthdays at the long table in what had been the Droughts’ dining room (now the sisters’), with its built-in china cabinets and extensive woodwork. “We had a good time,” she says, remembering those days.
Each evening, time was set aside for community recreation, with the sisters playing chess and other board games, as well as canasta. Sister Lucille McCreedy, CDP, the librarian, had a marimba that was kept downstairs, which she played superbly, and she taught some of the other nuns to play as well, including Sister Christine Morkovsky, CDP (known then as Sister Theresa Clare). “When we had parties, very often the marimba would supply the music,” Sister Christine adds.
Sister Christine remembers Archbishop Robert E. Lucey coming to say a field Mass when the new school opened. With him was her uncle, soon-to-be-Bishop John L. Morkovsky. The archbishop praised the sisters for their bravery in closing their five schools to start Providence. A fundraising company had been hired to raise money for the venture, Sister Christine related, and when they failed to do so adequately, Mother Angelique severed ties with them and the congregation continued fundraising on their own.
Sister Christine, having just received her driver’s license, often found herself the designated driver for the sisters’ maroon and wood station wagon — a gift given to Mother Angelique and passed on to the sisters at Providence due to its distance from Our Lady of the Lake and for needed errands.
One that stands out in Sister Christine’s memory was being dispatched on an emergency run by Sister Consolata to purchase a punch bowl with Sister Mary Elizabeth Jupe, CDP (formerly Sister Liberta), for a special occasion. Off they headed for downtown Joske’s, with the dread of parallel parking looming foremost in the young driver’s mind. “Yes, I’ve passed it on my test, but can I do it here downtown?” she worried. “Well,” she notes, “thanks be to God, I did it on the first try and she got her punch bowl!”
Sister Mary Elizabeth remembers her bed originally being in what the sisters called “the fish bowl,” so named because when the south balcony was converted into a dormitory-style bedroom, Ethel Drought’s former bedroom was surrounded on all sides. “Anybody on the porch could look in,” she said, “so we said we were in the fish bowl.”
She recalls accompanying Sister Consolata to Tyler, the “Rose Capital of the World,” to purchase the climbing roses Sister Consolata wanted for the fence surrounding the campus. Eventually the red roses covered the fence.
The sisters rarely ventured down into the Drought House cellar, which was used for storage — notably, recalls Sister Angelina Breaux, CDP, for the cases of beer the Marianist brothers annually presented the sisters with at Christmas. The sisters did not drink beer, but graciously did not tell the brothers this and had quite a stockpile by the time Sister Florence Marie Kubis, CDP, of German descent, came to the Drought House as superior.
“She decided that she was going to introduce us to that, recalls Sister Angelina, “and she planned a picnic for us, right there on the property.” It was a hot day and out came the cold beer, the first Sister Angelina had ever tasted.
Sister Angelina was not smitten with the beverage, but two of the sisters did develop a taste for it, leading to a later incident in which a little freshman girl helping Sister Angelina carry things over to the house after a school function came upon the pair sipping a beer in the Drought House kitchen. “She was so shocked,” recalls Sister Angelina, “she didn’t know what to do with herself. And she said to me, ‘I didn’t see anything, sister!’”
Most of the sisters’ time was occupied with school and prayer. Mass was held every morning in their chapel (the Droughts’ former living or “informal” room), where Sister Odilia McCarty, CDP, painted stations of the cross and a painting behind the altar.
On the landing of the hall staircase, flanked by its leaded glass bay window, stood Sister Joan Michele’s statue of Our Lady of the Assumption from Italy, a gift from her parents in honor of the Assumption being declared a church dogma in 1950. At Christmas, a decorated tree graced the landing.
The peacefulness of the Drought House was disturbed a few times by break-ins. Sister Miriam Fidelis Mellein, CDP, now 91, recalls being awakened by an ear-piercing scream in the middle of the night from a sister in the adjoining bedroom, whose door was opened by an intruder who promptly fled in terror himself, never to be apprehended.
Sister Joan Michele remembers being told by the police the sisters needed to install dead bolts. World War II was not long past and he told them many soldiers had learned to pick locks when taking cities.
Sister Antoinette Billeaud, CDP, Providence’s current principal, lived at the house from 1966 to 1968 as a teacher and, again, when serving as principal from 1976 to 1982. Her first stay, she quartered in the porch “dormitory,” consisting of beds and chairs alternating tightly in a row. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, she remembers, “but we were young and foolish. We had a good time on that porch!”
She remembers cook-outs and barbecues on the lawn and that 23 sisters called the Drought House home. “It was nice living downtown,” she says. “We were in the middle of everything that was happening in the city.”
Sister Mary Jane Bell, CDP, one of the house’s last residents, first lived there in 1971-72, returning in the ’80s. By 1995, she was one of only seven sisters working at the school and residing in the house, which was becoming badly in need of repair.
The roof leaked and the congregation, feeling major repairs were out of the question, sadly decided to close up the house in 1995 and move the sisters to other quarters. The end had not yet come for the old house though, as we shall see in the fourth and final installment of this series on Providence High School’s Drought House in the next issue.