Sisters of the Holy Cross added luster to Silver Reef

Intermountain Catholic

+ Enlarge

Saint Mary's school in Silver Reef, Utah, was established in 1879 and run by Sisters of the Holy Cross. Classes were held in the basement of St. John Catholic Church. Diocese of Salt Lake City archive photo

By Gary Topping

Archivist, Diocese of Salt Lake City

I once asked Holy Cross Sister Patricia Riley about the charism, or the major purpose, of her order. Her answer was, "We meet needs."

My reaction was, "Well, that takes in quite a bit!"

And indeed it does. I know very little of the multitudinous good works the sisters have done since the order’s founding in France in 1841 and their first arrival in the United States in 1843, but I would wager that even a knowledgeable historian would be hard-pressed to find an instance where their resilience and creativity in "meeting needs" were tested more than in Silver Reef, Utah.

During the mid-1870s a mining boom began some 20 miles northeast of St. George in response to discovery of a rich vein of silver in a sandstone formation. It is the only place silver has ever been found in such a context, and geologists are unable to explain it. But its economic and social significance became almost immediately apparent, as a boom town of largely Irish Catholic miners sprang up in the midst of the Mormon settlements known as the Cotton Mission. For about a decade, the Mormon farmers and the Catholic miners enjoyed a symbiotic relationship: the miners needed food and building materials, while the Mormons needed markets and cash.

Many of the miners came to Utah from Pioche, Nev., where Father Lawrence Scanlan (later the first Bishop of Salt Lake) had served his first pastorate on the Western frontier, and were well known to him. But how to bring them pastoral care, when Silver Reef was some 300 miles from Salt Lake City? Imagine Fr. Scanlan creaking along that far in a horse and buggy to bring the Gospel to Silver Reef Catholics! Eventually he built a church and recruited a succession of three resident priests to minister there. He also built a school and a hospital, and to administer those he persuaded altogether nine Holy Cross Sisters to "meet needs" in one of the most remote Catholic parishes in the country.

Throughout their tenure in this diocese, which began in 1875, the Holy Cross sisters have been school teachers and administrators, so creating a high-quality school in Silver Reef came naturally to them. One of them even offered piano lessons, and it was through those that the talent of Nora Gleason, later the first organist at the Cathedral of the Madeleine, was discovered.

Nursing was a more recently developed ministry. Holy Cross Sisters had begun nursing in response to the horrors of the Civil War, but they had learned to "meet that need" well enough that they established Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City (their first in America) in 1875. They also established a hospital in Silver Reef in about 1879. Mining is an infamously dangerous occupation, so the hospital they established across the street from the church in Silver Reef did a brisk business. Although patients had to pay doctors’ fees and purchase medicine, hospital care was free, owing to a plan worked out by Fr. Scanlan and Silver Reef residents: Each resident paid an insurance premium of a dollar a month. Fr. Scanlan and the Holy Cross Sisters had created the first group hospitalization insurance plan in Utah history!

Although mining in Silver Reef limped along until after the turn of the century, most operations closed by 1885 as the silver petered out, and in that year Fr. Scanlan closed the town’s Catholic church, school, and hospital, freeing the Holy Cross Sisters to "meet needs" in other parts of the diocese.