The very first gift I was given after I started publicizing this project came from someone I had never met. She contacted me on Instagram and told me she had her mom's yearbooks from Mt. Alvernia High School and was I interested in borrowing them? Who turns that down?! Not me! The years were 1949 and 1950. I wasn't very familiar with the building yet, so I flipped through them, they made me sneeze a lot, and I set them aside. Until I was finished with the project, and then they were very valuable!
The second gift I was given was online, I was looking for information on the day care and happened upon a high school alumni Facebook group. I requested to join, and they let me in! One of the very first photos I came upon was the smiling face of a friend of mine, from a reunion event they had just held. I had no idea she graduated from the Mount, and when I approached her about it, she offered to help me with this project, and ended up assisting me on most of my visits while I documented the campus! Eileen was my third gift! Several other friends also told me they were graduates of the Mount. Now I had gone to high school not very far away, and even then was pretty familiar with the area and the local schools, but I had never heard of Mt. Alvernia High School before this project! Every gift was a treat and excited me even more to keep exploring. The girls in that group have been so amazing in helping me identify places and people and sharing their stories with me!
From this yearbook I learned that the school often used St. Clare Hall. In fact, later I learned that St. Clare Hall was originally used for novitiate training - young girls who wanted to become nuns were educated and housed here. (The chronology book goes so far as to document St. Clare Hall as the horse barn, but that is mentioned nowhere else and cannot be verified.) Later, in 1936 the high school was opened to all girls. The Motherhouse basement was renovated in 1957 to accommodate the entire high school, which occupied 85% of that space! And the auditorium/gym/cafeteria/ event space building, Scotus Hall, was built nearby in 1966.
It appears to be undocumented exactly when St. Clare Hall was built, but in 1939 the upper floors were renovated for sleeping accommodations for the Sisters during the summer months. Supposedly while the horses were still kept on the first floor! The first addition was put on in 1947 with a total remodel and a second addition was added in 1958 for more dormitories. This building is different than the Motherhouse, where individual sleeping rooms have individual bathrooms, and separate community living spaces and kitchens. In St. Clare Hall, there are many dormitory rooms (some with a removed wall for a larger room), some kitchen rooms, and communal bathrooms. Imagine my surprise when we opened a bathroom stall door to find a real bathtub instead of a toilet! That was a new one for me! Some stalls are showers also.
When I first walked these empty halls and documented the empty rooms, it was very hard to imagine what it looked like as a high school. Some water had gotten in some of the rooms and done damage. So it was a great blessing to see these photos as alumni shared and loaned me in their yearbooks. I've only documented 12 of them, so I've got much more to discover yet, I'm sure! Every person I've talked to who attended or taught here has wonderful memories and loved their time at Mount Alvernia High School.
The first room above has a lesson still drawn out on the chalkboard! The sign "Before Mt. Alvernia High School" hangs in the hall outside the former library. The former library room sustained the most water damage, you can see how high the water came in! More classrooms, fancy stairs even in the basement, and a hallway outside where the administration rooms had been.
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