Ellen Hayes exemplified stewardship in the early years of the Diocese of Salt Lake City

Friday, Oct. 14, 2016

On Oct. 28 we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Diocesan Development Drive.  

The advent of the DDD was a momentous event in the history of the Diocese of Salt Lake City (though few people probably realized it at the time) because it was the first attempt to create a systematic, ongoing fundraising mechanism here. 

Previously, when the bishop wished to initiate some big project, he had to rustle up one-time donations and hope he could find enough of them to make the project happen. 

Some bishops, to be sure, like the Right Reverend Lawrence Scanlan, were very good at it. The first Bishop of Salt Lake was fortunate to have had some big Irish Catholic mining fortunes to tap into, like the Kearns and Judge families, though he was also good at shaking down donors of much more modest means.

This month we look at the career of one of his less well-known big donors, Miss Ellen Hayes of Ely, Nev.

Ellen Hayes was born in 1856 into a family of four boys and four girls in the prominent shipping village of Youghal (pronounced “yawl”) in County Cork, on the southern Irish coast. At that time the Irish economy and society were still reeling from the devastation of the potato famine of the 1840s, and droves of poor Irish people were seeking their fortune elsewhere. Ellen left Ireland in 1884 to join her brother William, who in 1869 had followed the mining boom to Ely. (Another brother, Edward, was a priest in Iowa.)  

Like another successful immigrant, Levi Strauss, who made a fortune in San Francisco selling denim trousers to gold miners, the Hayeses decided there was more money to be had in mining the miners than in the mines themselves.

Their first venture was a bath house, but they gradually expanded to open a general store, a hotel, and large real estate investments. Real estate, in fact, became the nucleus of their large fortune when extension of a rail line to Ely in 1906 brought a large increase in population. When William died in 1904, Ellen ran the businesses by herself until her own death in 1909.

Ellen was a very dedicated Catholic who became warm friends with Bishop Scanlan and lobbied him insistently to provide a priest for that remote community. (Before 1931, when the Diocese of Reno was created, the eastern counties of Nevada were part of the Diocese of Salt Lake City.) Until 1907, when her lobbying finally bore fruit, she would nab any traveling priest and gather all the Ely Catholics for Mass in her hotel.

Although Ely was a long journey from Salt Lake City, which accounted for Bishop Scanlan’s difficulty in providing pastoral care, Ellen visited this city occasionally and gave generously of her means to support the construction of the Cathedral of the Madeleine. Some of her contributions are visible to this day: The Presentation window in the Cathedral’s west side bears her name as donor, and the Ascension window directly across the nave is a memorial to her brother William. She also donated the organ, at first anonymously, but Bishop Scanlan eventually persuaded her to allow acknowledgment of her donation.  

Her will stipulated a donation of $20,000 for creation of a miners’ hospital in Ely to be administered by the Bishop of Salt Lake City. Unfortunately, that donation went awry: the fund proved insufficient to do the job, and by that time there was little perceived need for such an institution. Ultimately our third bishop, the Right Rev. John J. Mitty, met with Hayes family members in England and secured permission to use the money for other charitable purposes.

Although we can be grateful for the contributions of Ellen Hayes, as we can for the likes of Mary Judge and Jennie Kearns, the programs of the diocese are today so large and varied that haphazard donations of those kinds would simply not sustain them. Nowadays the Diocesan Development Drive allows for support by our wealthy Catholics, but it also enables those of us who also love the Church but who are much less prosperous to provide significant support, as well.