The year 1937 was pivotal for Sister Antonia McHugh and the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. Sister Antonia retired after 23 years as the leader of the college, first as its dean and then as the college’s first president. A few months later, she received word that St. Catherine’s would be the first Catholic college to be granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.

Sister Antonia’s years of striving for a rigorous academic program, standardized curriculum, well-educated faculty and respectable library were vindicated as the college counted itself among the elite liberal arts schools in the nation.

Of course, Sister Antonia sought to build a college that was not only equal to Vassar or Wellesley, but also made better Christians. In doing so, no detail was beyond her notice. She personally planned campus gardens to be beautiful in every season with tulips, peonies, petunias, dahlias, snapdragons and asters blooming one after the other over the year. She also expanded the footprint of the college, commissioning Our Lady of Victory Chapel on the highest point of campus and supporting Mendel Hall for science in the 1920s. By 1937, this expanded college had educated 3,800 women from 25 states and 14 countries.

From its inception, the college also had a powerful list of supporters. Sometime in the 1890s, Mother Seraphina Ireland, mother superior of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in St. Paul, started to pursue the idea of building a college for women. She set her eye on a group of dense woods with a view of downtown St. Paul and Fort Snelling, but she did not yet have money to purchase it. Her brother, Archbishop John Ireland, gave the CSJs the royalties from a book he published in 1900, foreseeing that the new institution would be the CSJs’ greatest contribution to the community over the next 50 years.

The sisters fanned out across the country and went door to door to sell as many copies as they could to fund a college. After the land was purchased, Archbishop Ireland convinced Hugh Derham, a farmer in Rosemount, to donate $20,000 to build the first building of the new school. Named Derham Hall, it featured everything the new school needed from classrooms to dormitories, to a chapel. In 1905, it opened its doors as a high school when boarders from the nearby St. Joseph Academy moved in. College classes were launched in 1910, and the first two graduates completed their bachelor’s degrees in 1913.

For many decades, the campus offered both high school and college-level courses for young women, focusing on preparing all of them to be well-educated women of faith. In 1962, Derham Hall  moved from St. Kate’s campus five blocks east to 540 S. Warwick St., St. Paul. Then, in 1987, the high school merged with Cretin High School for boys, becoming the coeducational Cretin-Derham Hall. Today, Derham Hall and Our Lady of Victory Chapel are listed jointly on the U.S. Register of Historic Places recognizing their well-preserved architecture. Although the college has continued to expand, becoming St. Catherine University in 2009, Derham Hall still serves as its administration building and students still worship regularly in Our Lady of Victory Chapel.

Luiken is a Catholic and a historian with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She loves exploring and sharing the hidden histories that touch our lives every day.

Editor’s note: This story originally implied that Derham Hall was part of the then-College of St. Catherine’s campus until its merger with Cretin High School in 1987. However, the college preparatory school moved off the college campus to 540 S. Warwick St., St. Paul, in 1962. With the 1987 merger, Cretin-Derham Hall opened as one school on Cretin’s former campus. It has been corrected.