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Ow· Catlwlic Heritage in Texas
the parish and school of Our Lady of Guadalupe with her constant solici- tude for the suffering and the poor. Her memory is revered by all those who knew her and called her affectionately "Sister Wonderful," because no matter how badly things went, or how great were her privations, she would always end by saying, "Isn't it wonderful?" In 1940, at the request of Reverend Patrick R. Duffy, C.S.C., pastor of St. Ignatius Martyr in Austin, the Sisters took charge of the parish i;chool, and that same year they assisted Reverend Alfred Mendez, C.S.C., in the missions of San Jose near Austin. The school at Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Garfield, Texas, was reopened in 1931 and its missions of Elroy, Creedmoor. and Dry Creek were served. In 1940 they took care of the central mission of San Francisco. built for the three smaller com- munities. The Sisters of Holy Cross in Austin also do missionary work in Round Rock and Georgetown, Texas. 75 St. /11 ary's A cndemy in 111arsliall, 1880. Father Louis Granger, Pastor of St. Joseph's Church in Marshall, while on a visit to Clarksville, met Mother General M. Angela, C.S.C., who was on her visitation of Holy Cross Sisters in Texas. Impressed by their work, he requested that Sisters be sent to take charge of his parish school. The request was approved by the Very Reverend Edward A. Sorin, Director of the Sisters' Congre- gation, and Sisters M. Eudexia and M. Assumption of Clarksville set out for Marshall in the summer of 1880. Over the rough and muddy roads of the timber belt of East Texas, the two traveled in a covered wagon to their destination. They were warmly welcome to their "two-room shack" where there was no water and the bed was "a bale of hay covered with sheets donated by the charitable parishoners." 7 ' Through the summer the two Sisters begged and borrowed the essentials for the convent and school and in September they opened the parish school with an enrollment of forty, as compared to eleven the year before. By the end of the year two more Sisters were sent to Marshan from the Motherhouse in Indiana. A large proportion of the students was non- Catholic. The public school being unable to care for the students of the town, it became necessary to enlarge the facilities of St. Mary's by putting up a building for boys in 1882. which became known as St. Joseph's. 7SFrom data obtained from Mother Superior of St. Mary's Academy in Austin. See also Sisters of the Holy Cross, Our Prnvinces, Centenary Ckrnnicle.r flf tlte s;.rters <'f tl,e Hnly Cross (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1941), Book II. 74 Quoted in Cahill. f1'/J, dt., from records in the archives of St. Mary'i- Academy. Marshall, Texas,
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