Wisdom’s House

By Sister Margaret Clarke

This is the third in a multi-part history of the construction of Tower Hall and the Sisters’ move in 1909 to this site.

Wisdom has built her house; she has made its seven columns. … She says to those who are uneducated. .. “Come in here. … take the road o/understanding.” Provo 9:1-6 passim. NCV

In September of 1909, when the Sisters and boarding students from Sacred Heart Institute moved into the newly-constructed Villa Sancta Scholastica, they found a spacious and stately new home. One alumna, Valeria Sauve, reported in the June 1910 Villa Quarterly her first impressions: “there it stood on the hill in all its stately grandeur, reminding me very much of the feudal castles….” College students today still love “going to school in a castle.” The building contained public rooms on the first floor front: parlors, public offices, chaplain’s quarters, classrooms. Second floor had classrooms, Community offices, infirmary and Sisters’ private areas. Third and fourth floors had bedrooms in the westward-trending wings. On fourth floor front were the Chapel, music and art studios, and library. The students’ dining room was on first floor and the Sisters’ refectory on second.

A separate building adjacent to the northwest wing held science labs, laundry and sewing rooms, the kitchen, and the dynamo/boiler rooms in the basement. The total cost of the four-story building including the reconstruction was about $236,000. School opened on September 7, 1909, for 58 boarding students, including six postulants. Only sixteen professed Sisters lived at the Villa, along with eleven novices. The remainder of the 130 Community members lived on the various missions in Duluth and Brainerd. Everyone settled in, and school-elementary and Academy-progressed happily. The only cloud on the horizon was the need to pay the debt.

This anticipatory rendering of the completed Tower Hall was published in many Villa documents long before the construction of even the first tower. The dam on Chester Creek created a pond for skating as well as watering the livestock.