This article is the third in our series discussing the Sisters of the Holy Cross and their 146-year legacy of serving Utah and Park City. A quick recap before continuing.
Confronted with unrelenting hostility, Brigham Young and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faithful began migrating to the Great Basin in 1847. By the early 1870s over 85,000 LDS faithful lived in the Utah Territory — 95% of the region’s non-Native population. Their religious domination was unchallenged. The Catholic Church intended to alter the balance of power no matter how long it took. Their plans received a boost from technological and demographic trends.
May 10, 1869, witnessed completion of the county’s first transcontinental railroad. It was the greatest technological feat of the 19th century. Before completion, traversing the continent consumed up to six months, and all options were expensive and dangerous. Driving of the Golden Spike fundamentally changed the country. Coast to coast travel was reduced to two weeks or less. The cost also declined accordingly.
Low costs and reliable transportation fostered the development of mining in the western territories — Park City included. Those same enterprises required low-cost labor, and the railroads obliged. For a variety of reasons, Irish Catholic immigrants comprised a significant majority of those workers. And in addition to economic sustenance, they sought spiritual nourishment as well.
Against this backdrop, in August 1873, Archbishop Alemany of San Francisco dispatched Father Scanlan to the Utah territory. He became the first pastor of the sprawling region. For the previous five years he had distinguished himself delivering “the word of God” to mining communities in California and Nevada. He found a receptive constituency in the mining camps of northern Utah.
Above and beyond the “good word,” his audience needed education and some form of health care. Both were essentially nonexistent. Fulfilling them would require heavy lifting, so he conveyed his needs, opportunities and recommendations to church leadership. His prayers were answered. In 1875 Father Sorin, director general of the American Sisters of the Holy Cross, called Sister Anderson and Sister Raymond to assist Father Scanlan and the underserved in the Utah territory. They arrived in Salt Lake City on June 6, 1875. More Sisters would follow. Their combined accomplishments would be remarkable.
The Sisters visited every mining camp from Ophir to Alta. In their first three months they raised $25,000 (approximately $640,000 today). This represented a down payment on their ambitious plans. In September 1875, not quite four months after arriving, they opened their first school — St. Mary’s Academy. It quickly distinguished itself as one of the premier educational programs in the city.
In October, the Sisters opened the first Holy Cross Hospital — and established the country’s first health maintenance organization, or HMO. The hit parade continued with St. Joseph’s School in Eureka, Kearn’s St. Ann’s Orphanage in Salt Lake City, The Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden, and St. Mary’s of the Assumption in Park City — a community with 14% of the territory’s entire Irish population.
The Sisters and their organization become embedded in the communities they served. They tended to those in need, no exceptions allowed. The greatest challenge to their time honored tradition of doing “what is right” lurked over the horizon. They would respond accordingly.
Part 4 will discuss the Sisters investment to restore health care to the Park City community while simultaneously battling one of the state, and world’s, greatest public health emergencies: the AIDS crisis.