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History of Georgetown Visitation

Making Georgetown Visitation

IN 1799, Father Leonard Neale (later Bishop and Archbishop), President of Georgetown College (later University), invited "three pious ladies" from Philadelphia — Alice Lalor, Maria McDermott, and Maria Sharpe—to found a school for young women. With little more than faith and determination, they accepted his challenge and opened a school in a simple one-room house. Now one of the oldest Catholic girls’ schools in the nation, Visitation has grown and flourished for more than 225 years.

Beginnings in Georgetown


How Visitation’s founders gathered in the thriving port of the Town of George and began building a Convent for nuns and an academy for girls.

The Early 19th Century to the Civil War

How early school leadership developed a rigorous curriculum, expanded the campus, and taught young women, who went on to distinguish themselves and their country.

Georgetown Visitation and Slavery

How individuals whom the Convent enslaved supported this institution’s mission.

The Late 19th Century

How highly educated nuns nurtured young intellects in the late nineteenth century in the nation’s capital.

The Early 20th Century

How students found their voice in writing, their talents in athletics, and their taste for school traditions in the early twentieth century.

The Mid 20th Century

How the Sisters contributed to the war effort and responded to the ever-increasing demands for higher levels of education for women in this country.

The 1993 Fire, The Bicentennial, and Beyond


How the Sisters, lay faculty, and staff rebuilt after tragedy and formed a twenty-first century school on the same plat of land on which girls have been taught since 1799.

Beginnings in Georgetown

Georgetown Visitation was founded in 1799. Today it is a thriving college preparatory school, home to a religious community, and a site with fourteen buildings on the historic registry, nine of them built before the Civil War. It has laid claim to be the oldest Catholic school for girls in the original thirteen colonies, but this is not precisely true since it was founded in the District of Columbia.

The land on which Georgetown Visitation still stands had once been part of Maryland, but by the time the school was founded, it was part of Washington, DC, as the federal district was established in 1790. It would be a decade before President John Adams relocated the government from Philadelphia to the District in 1800. The founders opened the school one year before President Adams arrived. Enslaved people labored at Visitation from its founding until 1862.

This circa 1799 map shows Visitation’s original campus (lower right) and the estate of Georgetown Mayor John Threlkeld (upper left). The notations, added by Visitation, are interpretations of where structures would have stood and are drawn from publicly available records. Library of Congress Map Collection. 

This circa 1799 embroidered picture by one of the school’s first students, Catherine F. Queen, shows Georgetown Visitation’s early campus. Georgetown Visitation Monastery Archives. 

The school opened near Georgetown College (now University) because its fourth President, Father Leonard Neale, S.J. (later Bishop and Archbishop) co-founded the Academy and Convent. He invited Alice Lalor, whom he had known in Philadelphia, and soon after, Maria McDermott and Maria Sharpe, to run the school. These founders would come to be called “The Three Pious Ladies.”

These painted copies from originals at the first Visitation house in Annecy, France portray St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal. Father Michael Wheeler brought them back to Georgetown after a visit to Annecy in 1829. Collection of Georgetown Visitation. 

When Father Neale completed his tenure as President in 1806, he moved to a house on the Convent grounds and brought with him George, a man he held in slavery. While residing on the Convent grounds, Neale purchased more enslaved people, including Stace and another man named George, as discussed further below. As they determined the nature of the religious community they would found, Neale and the "Three Pious Ladies” discerned that the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary  fit their needs. Founded in 1610 in Annecy, France, by St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal, this cloistered order valued contemplative life but required no severe asceticism.

The founding Sisters were drawn to the work of these saints for their liberty of spirit, optimism, simplicity, and common-sense approach to life. When Father Neale’ became Archbishop of Baltimore in 1815, they were able to communicate directly with Rome. The following year the Pope granted permission to form the first Visitation house in the Americas.

Although enrollment records in the nascent Academy are scant, there seems to have been sixteen paying students by 1820. In 1826, enrollment had increased to forty-eight, and by this time leadership had changed. Father Joseph-Pierre Picot de Clorivière had become chaplain in 1819. A French royalist and nobleman whose parents had been put to death during the French Revolution, Clorivière had been part of a conspiracy to kill Napoleon. He volunteered in the year 1800 to give the signal to detonate an explosive his co-conspirators had placed near the path of Napoleon’s carriage. When this assassination plot failed, Clorivière fled to the southern United States, and in 1812, he was ordained as a Jesuit priest. Upon arrival at Georgetown in 1819, he donated his family inheritance to the Visitation Convent and Academy. Using these funds and his considerable architectural expertise, he oversaw the design and construction of four buildings in eight years. His accomplishments from 1819 until his death in 1826 have earned him the unofficial title of Georgetown Visitation’s “second founder.”

The Early 19th Century to the Civil War

The Academy’s first published prospectus in 1822 shows a modest school struggling to define women’s education in this country. With the arrival in 1818 of Sister Mary Austin Barber – who had run her own school in New England before converting to Catholicism and entering religious life – Visitation’s academic program and teaching standards began to improve.

In 1826, shortly before his death, Father Clorivière designed and initiated construction of the Odeon, an elegant Neoclassical assembly hall for hosting the annual public examinations, which drew spectators from around the region. This building also had spaces for bathing, dressmaking, and scientific laboratories.

In 1828, the Sisters and Father Michael Wheeler, Father Clorivière’s replacement as chaplain, ordered from abroad scientific instruments costing $2,447, a sizable expense indicating commitment to an academically rigorous curriculum.

Father Clorivière designed the Odeon, which was dedicated in 1827. It stood where Fennessy Hall stands today and was razed before 1872. Georgetown Visitation School Archives.

This circa 1899 photograph taken by Francis Benjamin Johnston shows the science laboratory with some of the scientific instruments purchased in 1828. Still surviving in the school archives are the air pump (at far left) and the electrostatic generator (with wide brass frame, in the back right near the cabinet). Georgetown Visitation School Archives.

The 1827 Academy prospectus signed by Father Wheeler confirms that students were examined in geography, history, mythology, astronomy, chemistry, French, Spanish, and vocal and instrumental music. This prospectus must have been co-written with the young and ambitious new directress of the academy appointed the previous year, Sister Ann Gertrude Wightt. It was she who established the annual public examinations in the Odeon, at which several U.S. presidents distributed student awards during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1829, Sister Gertrude oversaw the construction of a new dormitory to accommodate increasing enrollment. This required the acquisition of additional lots of land along what is now P Street, and expanding campus beyond a one-block radius.

Though Rome had recognized the Georgetown Visitation Order in 1816, it was on May 24, 1828, that the Sisters were incorporated by Congress, an act signed by President John Quincy Adams. Just a few months later, Adams came to the Academy to distribute awards at the annual commencement exercises. In 1838, increasing enrollment prompted the West Academy’s construction, which provided additional classrooms, a dining room, and the Playroom, which is still used today by juniors as their common space. This new building, which was constructed adjacent to the 1829 dormitory and 1819 infirmary, formed the head of a line of structures called Gallerie, named for the first Visitation house in Annecy, France.

Around this time, prominent families began sending their daughters to the school. In 1830, the great granddaughter of Martha Washington, Britannia Wellington Peter (later Kennon), graduated. The niece and ward of James Buchanan, Harriet Lane (later Johnston), graduated in 1848; she would go on to become First Lady when her bachelor uncle became U.S. President James Buchanan in 1857.

This circa 1899 photograph taken by Francis Benjamin Johnston shows the Playroom in the West Academy, which was built in 1838. Georgetown Visitation School Archives. 

Georgetown Visitation and Slavery

Georgetown Visitation has operated continuously on its original grounds since 1799. From its founding until the April 1862 emancipation of all people enslaved in Washington, DC, Georgetown Visitation participated in—and benefitted from—the institution of slavery. Visitation subsidized its mission by the forced labor and sale of enslaved people.

Historical records held by Georgetown Visitation, neighboring Catholic institutions, and public records hold significant – although incomplete – details about the extent of this slaveholding, its financial implications, and the identities and lives of some of the people the Sisters enslaved. For example, the 1800 census lists one enslaved person living with the school’s founders, while the 1850 census lists seventeen enslaved people living on Visitation’s grounds. However, the extent of Visitation’s historical entanglements with slavery is greater than what these censuses reveal.

The Sisters, who had taken vows of poverty, held people in slavery. In some cases, Sisters inherited enslaved people from family members. Some of these enslaved people lived at Visitation and were forced to labor on the Sisters’ behalf. Others were sold without ever coming to Georgetown. In other cases, Visitation Sisters bought and sold individuals and families specifically for the financial benefit of the Convent and the school. Other enslaved people were “hired out” by the Sisters, who received compensation for the services they were forced to provide outside of Visitation. The Sisters also paid other enslavers to rent the help of people those individuals enslaved. In short, the Sisters of Georgetown Visitation participated in, perpetuated, and benefitted from the system of slavery in a wide variety of ways.

Records from the Monastery Archives show that during Father Clorivière’s tenure, the Convent employed a dealer in Southern Maryland who sold enslaved people inherited by nuns or donated by benefactors to fund a building campaign. Handwritten letters from the 1800s recount transactions orchestrated by Visitation Sisters and George W. Neale, the dealer who facilitated the purchase and sale of dozens of enslaved people on behalf of the Convent.

 

List documenting the sale of 21 enslaved people between the years of 1819 and 1822, an account reconciled between the Convent and George W. Neale, the Convent’s dealer of enslaved people in Southern Maryland, March 25, 1824. Georgetown Visitation Monastery Archives.

This late eighteenth-century brick outbuilding (with twentieth century modifications) was on land owned by the Convent’s neighbors, the Threlkeld family, and may originally have been built as a dairy or “milk house.” For many years, it was referred to by many in the Visitation community as the “slave cabin.” It still stands on campus today, north of Visitation’s tennis courts. 

Georgetown Visitation is in the process of digitizing its historical records pertaining to enslaved people and making them available in the GV Digital History of Enslaved People Archive. 

Primary sources held by the National Archives and by the Georgetown Visitation Monastery Archives contain information on manumissions and self-emancipations. On April 16, 1862, the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act freed over 3,100 individuals in the federal district, including twelve people over whom the Sisters of the Visitation held a claim.

The law provided for financial compensation to enslavers for the people whom they had enslaved. The Sisters of the Visitation filed a petition seeking compensation for twelve people whom they had claimed as their property before Emancipation—nine members of the Tilghman family and three men: Thomas Weldon, Joseph Dixon, and Benjamin Mahoney. Government records show that Ignatius Tilghman responded by filing a counter-petition, citing his 1856 agreement with the Visitation Sisters, in which he was to buy his and his family’s freedom for $500. He argued that the Sisters should not be compensated for the amount that he had already paid toward his family’s freedom. The Sisters vigorously contested his counterclaim. While the Convent was not allotted the exact amount that Ignatius Tilghman had paid them when the government eventually compensated the Sisters in 1864, no records suggest that Ignatius Tilghman was compensated instead for any of the money that he had paid toward his and his family’s freedom.

Following emancipation, Ignatius and his wife, Susan Tilghman, and their seven living children lived in the District of Columbia for about 20 years until some of them moved to Philadelphia around 1900. Others formerly enslaved by the Convent took different paths. Benjamin Mahoney served in the Navy during the Civil War, eventually becoming ill, after which he was discharged, possibly dying shortly thereafter. Thomas Weldon and Joseph Dixon both married and raised their families in Southern Maryland.

Despite oral tradition at Georgetown Visitation that the Sisters taught enslaved children to read, no written records have been found to substantiate this. In fact, federal census records indicate that many people formerly enslaved by Visitation were illiterate. Of the fourteen people freed between 1853 and 1862, data cannot be found for two; another two were too young to be taught; six were recorded as illiterate; and documentary evidence for the other four is inconclusive. These records suggest that people enslaved at Visitation at that time had not been taught to read or write.

Another oral tradition referred to a “slave cabin” behind today’s tennis courts. This name, which can be traced to the late 1930s when segregation was still legal, was used in Visitation’s 1969 filing with the Historic American Buildings Registry. The moniker suggested that enslaved people lived in the cabin. No records that tell how the structure was used on Visitation’s campus have been found. It was built in the late eighteenth century by the Threlkeld family, potentially as a dairy for processing milk. In the late 1940s, it was refurbished into a recreational field house and became the site for the annual student Marshmallow Roast during Founders Day celebrations. For decades, the casual use of this misnomer caused many students and others in the Visitation community great discomfort. It was particularly harmful to Visitation’s Black students.

The Late 19th Century

This bird’s eye view of campus is a detail of Adolph Sachse’s National Capital Map, which dates 1883–84. Thirty-fifth Street was originally called Fayette and P Street was Third Street. Library of Congress Map Collection. 

This 1906 photograph shows Sister Mary Paulina Finn on graduation day.

Visitation’s campus was largely undeveloped throughout the nineteenth century save land cleared for planting crops and grazing cattle. The Sisters still ran a good-sized working farm with a small orchard that provided food for both Sisters and students.

The school in the mid- to late nineteenth century continued to attract prominent families and graduate prominent alumnae. Emily Warren (later Roebling), class of 1860, is well known for her role as site manager of the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction. When Warren graduated, science and math instruction were emphasized. The 1861–1862 prospectus tells that the students studied astronomy, natural philosophy (physics, biology, etc.), chemistry, botany, mineralogy, geography, geometry, algebra, and even bookkeeping. They also focused on reading, writing, grammar, rhetoric, and logic, as well as Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, or French. The visual arts were also taught, such as needlework, tapestry, and lacework, as well as watercolor and oil painting.

Alumna Bertha Honoré (later Palmer), class of 1867, may have learned art appreciation at Visitation, going on to amass the largest collection of Impressionist art outside of France. After graduating, she also supported suffragist causes and labor unions. In 1893, as President of the Board of Lady Managers for the Chicago World Columbian Exposition, she created the Women’s Building, which was dedicated to displaying the accomplishments of women around the world and the problems they had yet to overcome. The building itself was designed by a female architect, decorated with murals by female painters, and filled with music composed by women. She also commissioned from the chef at the Palmer House Hotel an easy-to-eat dessert for strolling through the exhibits; this would become the first brownie.

Another alumna, Harriet Monroe, class of 1879, wrote and delivered the dedicatory ode at the Columbian Exposition’s opening ceremonies. While a student at Visitation, she studied with Sister Paulina Finn, a published author of several books in prose, poetry, and drama under the pseudonym M.S. Pine. After graduation, Monroe became a prominent writer and poet who established the literary magazine, Poetry, which she edited until her death in 1912. Under her editorial guidance, the journal introduced the work of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. This journal is still in publication today.

In 1872, the Sisters commissioned from Philadelphian architect Norris G. Starkweather a late Victorian, Italianate, four-story building with mansard detailing on its top level to serve as the main Academy building. This building became an iconic component of the school's identity.

In addition to Sister Paulina Finn, several other Sisters entered religious life after obtaining advanced degrees. In 1882, Sister Regina Toomey entered with a degree from the State Normal and Teaching School of New York. In 1885, Sister Mary Baptista Linton produced an award-winning educational system for teaching history, called the Linton Century Charts, and authored several historical texts to accompany it.

It was around this time that the cemetery in the southwest corner of the Convent garden reached capacity, so a “New Cemetery” was platted in 1887. In 1891, the Sisters built a wash house with a state-of-the-art industrial laundry machine. This building now houses the Senior Lodge. In 1895, the Convent added a large, two-story brick barn for keeping livestock and horses, which was renovated in the late 1950s into St. Bernard Library.

The Starkweather Academy Building was designed by Norris G. Starkweather in 1873.

This 1913 scrapbook photograph serves as one of the earliest documents of Marshmallow Roast.

The Early 20th Century

In 1913, the Monastery arranged for Georgetown University Jesuit professors to conduct instruction to nuns through the wooden parlor screen so as to observe the rules of enclosure of the cloister while still affording the Sisters an education. By 1938, bachelor’s degrees had been earned by 18 nuns. Eight achieved master’s degrees, and four completed doctoral degrees from Georgetown.

In 1917, the school restructured to accommodate four grammar school classes and four at the high school level, along with two post-academic years being offered to graduates. These advanced classes eventually became the Junior College.

World War I brought changes to the student body. Latin American parents who usually sent their daughters to Europe for schooling could no longer do so during the war, and so some turned to Georgetown Visitation instead. The class of 1917–1918, for example, had two students from Cuba, two from El Salvador, one from Chile, one from Puerto Rico, and two from Nicaragua. Two of these girls, Isabel and Margarita Cardenal, were the future aunts of Ernesto Cardenal, the prominent Nicaraguan priest, poet, and activist politician.

In 1918, the Benevolent School was absorbed by Holy Trinity Parish to create a co-educational elementary school. Founded in 1819, the Benevolent School had always been independent from the academy. Its charitable mission was to teach, feed, and clothe children with no living parents or girls from low-income families in the neighborhood. In 1929, the academy’s lower school closed due to lack of enrollment, enabling more attention to be given to the older pupils.

Junior College students boarded in a building that, in 1921, J.H. Fennessy had funded originally to be an infirmary, although it was never used for that purpose. Designed by Sister Stanislaus Nolen and Sister Benedicta Mullen, Fennessy Hall is a modified mail order kit home.

During the late 1920s and 1930s classes competed by staging theatrical performances, usually a Shakespeare play. And perhaps it is this regular contest that transformed into the tradition of Marshmallow Roast, which can be documented as early as 1913. Eventually students started writing original productions, and it later changed into a “roast,” with skits that good-naturedly teased faculty and staff. It is a fitting tradition at a Salesian school as eutrapela is a little virtue linked to helping others and ourselves remain humble through poking fun in order to help people be comfortable with their idiosyncrasies. Indeed, in his Introduction to the Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales, says that, "By them we take an honest and friendly recreation from such frivolous occasions as human imperfections furnish us with."

In 1937, Visitation’s other beloved tradition, an athletic house-based competition called Gold-White, was developed by the Athletic Association, which had been founded in 1917. This was in part because the campus had a new gymnasium, which had been built during the Great Depression in 1935. After this time, athletics became increasingly important as part of extracurricular offerings.

In the mid-1930s, the athletic uniform switched from long skirts to mid-thigh bloomers, but the girls still wore tan knee-high socks to obscure as much skin as possible.

In 1942, four anti-aircraft gun batteries were installed on the pasture beyond where McNabb Field is today.

The Mid-20th Century

In support of the defense of Washington, DC, during World War II, the Monastery sold their livestock to make way for the installation of four anti-aircraft gun batteries on the pasture beyond the lacrosse field.

After the war, with the farm animals gone, the 1895 barn was falling into disuse, so, in 1959, the Sisters had it renovated into St. Bernard Library. A covered walkway linked this re-designed space to the newly built St. Joseph Hall, which provided much-needed classrooms.

The Junior College had thrived at a time when women sought higher levels of education, and the Sisters had responded to that demand. But in the 1960s, women had more choices than ever. So, because of waning enrollment, rising costs of operating two schools, and a shortage of religious personnel, the Junior College was closed in 1964.

By the mid-sixties, the school started seeing a decline in the number of resident students, so the boarding school was closed in 1975. This was a difficult decision made when Sister Mary Berchmans Hannan, VHM, '48 & '50 was Headmistress.

This circa 1968 photograph shows dissection in biology class in St. Joseph Hall with Sister Mary Cecilia Clark.

This photograph from the early 1970s shows Headmistress Sister Mary Berchmans Hannan at her desk.

Sister Mary Berchmans had initially come to Visitation as a 14-year-old to join the sophomore class, graduating in 1948, and from the Junior College in 1950. She entered the Monastery the next year, professing in 1952. She taught Visitation students Latin and religion for many years. She became headmistress of the school in 1969, serving in that role for 20 years, and later as president for the next 17.

By 1979, the student body numbered 372. The faculty of 39 counted eight Sisters in its ranks, along with a curriculum director, a registrar, a guidance counselor, and a college counselor. One of many beloved and inspired teachers was Sister Mary de Sales McNabb '48. She developed innovative courses in science and computers and served as Mother Superior at the Monastery from 1984 to 1990, and again from 1996 to 2002.

This photograph from the late 1970s shows Sister Mary de Sales McNabb lecturing in her classroom.

Enrollment steadily increased, and in 1986 Daniel Kerns Jr. became assistant head of school and academic dean. Three years later he was appointed head of school, the first lay leader, and Sister Mary Berchmans Hannan took the newly formed position of president.

In 1988, the Salesian Network was formed as a way of naming and explaining Visitation charism, which the Sisters had always shared by example. In acknowledgement of the fact that lay faculty and staff were the school’s future, the next year began with a fundraising effort, the Century III Endowment Fund, for faculty enrichment and salaries, as well as student scholarships.

The 1993 Fire, the Bicentennial, and Beyond

On July 8, 1993, a fire broke out in the Starkweather Academy’s attic. Its exterior walls survived as a three-story-tall brick shell, behind which a new modern building, Founders Hall, was erected.

The following year, while the academy was being rebuilt, the school’s Board of Advisors became a Board of Trustees. The Monastery Board of Directors handed over the school’s operation to the Board of Trustees, while reserving power to ensure its Catholic and Salesian mission. Like the historic walls holding up Founders Hall, the Sisters’ prayers and advice continue to support the school. Lay school administrators, many of whom worked alongside the Sisters, took the reins from an order of female religious who had taught on that campus for 195 years. Everyone celebrated the dedication of Founders Hall on May 5, 1995.

The fire had not spread to the Chapel, but smoke and water wrought considerable damage. In 1996, it was renovated for the second time in its 175 years; the first was in 1856–58, when men likely enslaved by the Convent raised the roof to add a third floor. The Chapel was re-consecrated on December 21, 1996, and, with no time to rest, the late 1990s had an eye toward the bicentennial.

This bird’s eye view from July 8, 1993, shows the Starkweather Academy burning after the fire re-ignited and collapsed the building’s interior.

Berchmans Hall, named after Sister Mary Berchmans Hannan, was dedicated on October 5, 2019.

Dr. Edmondson & Sister Berchmans at Dr. E's installation

Dr. Barbara McGraw Edmondson and Sister Mary Berchmans Hannan, VHM, '48 & '50, at Dr. Edmondson's installation as head of school.

A campus redesign moved a parking lot from between the gym and Founders Hall to behind the Lodge. This re-claimed green quadrangle was bordered by the 1935 gym, renovated into The Catherine E. Nolan Performing Arts Center, along with the newly built Sarah and Charles T. Fisher Athletic Center. The two buildings were completed in October 1998 and dedicated at a kickoff celebration for the bicentennial, with many events during that academic year to acknowledge Visitation’s two hundredth anniversary.

The year of 1934 had brought the first lay woman to teach an academic subject. Now all faculty members are laypeople. Some have PhDs. Many are alumnae, teaching in ways they learned from the Sisters. The model of laypeople leading continued with Mary Kate Blaine becoming school principal in 2013. A fundraising campaign, which began that fall, enriched the school’s endowment, funded a new turf surface for McNabb Field in 2014, renovated the Sheehy Dining Room in 2016, and, that same year, established the St. Jane de Chantal Salesian Center.

These donations also funded two new buildings in 2019. Berchmans Hall, named for Sister Mary Berchmans Hannan, VHM, ’48 & ’50, is a two-story addition to St. Joseph Hall with classrooms, science labs, and an art studio. The covered walkway between St. Bernard Library and St. Joseph Hall became the Saints Connector, with common areas and an innovation lab - the McNabb Lab, named for Sister Mary de Sales McNabb ‘48. These interconnected buildings that honor these long-serving Sisters span three centuries from 1895 to 2019.

After 30 years serving the school, Daniel Kerns Jr. retired from his position as head of school in the spring of 2019, having seen over 3,200 students graduate. Dr. Barbara McGraw Edmondson started in July 2019 as head of school. The women and men working today at Georgetown Visitation stand on the shoulders of the institution’s founders and the many Visitation Sisters, who have lived, prayed, and taught on this same piece of land under every U.S. president except George Washington.