By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Editor’s note: 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Holy Cross Sisters in Salt Lake City. Their kindness, hard work, and devotion changed Utah history forever and touched countless Utah lives. Over the next year, I will tell some of those stories here in the blog.)
Although Patrick Stack (an Irish immigrant) and Freddie (a horse) did not have much in the world, they did have each other, the Holy Cross Sisters, and the old Holy Cross hospital in Salt Lake City. Turns out they did not need much else.
The Holy Cross Sisters first arrived in Utah on June 6, 1875. Sister Raymond (Mary) Sullivan and Sister Augusta (Amanda) Anderson traveled to Salt Lake City via train and stagecoach from their convent in South Bend, Indiana at the invitation of Father Lawrence Scanlan (soon to be the local Catholic bishop).
Scanlan hoped the good order of sisters—originally from France but soon full of hardworking and devoted Irish Catholic nuns—would help him build schools and meet other local human and spiritual needs. With their trademark energy and industriousness, within just a few months the Holy Cross Sisters had started both a school and a hospital in Salt Lake.
Over the next hundred and fifty years, they also would create a dozen other Utah schools, found two other hospitals, start an orphanage, form a school of nursing, build a college, and start numerous other social service ministries. They’d also serve at or support almost every other local Catholic institution in Utah.
One of those wonderful places they started was the old Holy Cross Hospital nestled on a downtown Salt Lake City block between South Temple and First South, and 10th and 11th East Streets. I don’t know exactly how Patrick (Pat) Stack first got there.
Born in County Kerry, Ireland in 1871, Pat arrived in America in 1894 at about age 23. He started work at the Holy Cross Hospital just a few years later.
My guess is that—like so many Irishmen in their 20s in the 19th century—Pat came to Utah looking for fame and fortune in the Park City mines. Instead, he likely got hurt or injured.
The Holy Cross Sisters probably cared for him at their hospital and then, in their spirit of caring for the whole person, offered him a job and a place to live. Pat accepted, and stayed there for the next four decades.
The woman in charge of the hospital at the time, Holy Cross Sister Lidwina, was born in Ireland’s County Carlow. She understood the Irish nature and how to help a lad down on his luck.
Pat Stack more than earned his keep after Sister Lidwina’s act of compassion.
Folks admired him for the delicious peaches he carefully cultivated in the Holy Cross orchard. Pat’s roses were so lovely that Salt Lake City planted a huge municipal rose garden on the acres Pat tended and gave the Sisters a bouquet of roses as rent each year.
Pat supplied the hospital’s staff with boutonnieres and left fresh cut flowers in patient rooms to cheer them up. Contemporary newspaper reports indicate that everyone appreciated his kind, friendly, and generous nature.
The archived newspapers also say he grew a large circle of friends, including nurses, doctors, patients, priests, nuns, and fellow gardeners. They all were so fond of him that for 20 years, the hospital celebrated Pat’s November birthday with a gala.
Despite all those connections, Pat’s best friend and constant companion at the old Holy Cross Hospital was a broken-down old horse.
Freddie the horse got there the same way Pat Stack likely did—through an illness. While working as an ice wagon horse for Salt Lake City Parks Commissioner P.H. Goggins, Freddie got pneumonia.
Freddie recovered, but was weak. Calling Freddie the best horse he’d ever had, the parks commissioner donated him to the hospital.
Freddie pulled the hospital lawnmower and the linen cart. When Freddie got distracted, Pat got him back on track with a few firm but kind words spoken in Pat’s native Irish language.
I love how the Salt-Lake-City-born-and-bred horse apparently understood Gaelic instinctively.
Freddie’s main job duties, however, consisted of what one newspaper called a form of “retired pension.” Freddie spent many happy hours grazing contently in the hospital’s orchard or delighting the local schoolchildren.
Children loved the horse that newspapers described as “sad eyed” and “swaybacked and wheezy.” One little boy told the hospital that his father would pay “a million bucks” so the boy could take Freddie home with him.
When his daily chores were done, Freddie waited by a fence that separated the hospital grounds from a nearby school. After the bell rang, the children rushed over and lined up to ride Freddie.
Freddie stood patiently—or laid down—while the children climbed aboard his concave back. Old newspapers say the 25-year-old horse then walked the grounds with “methodical and dignified pacing” and “no one ever guided him and no one was ever bucked off.”
In April 1936, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Salt Lake Telegram, and the Deseret News all reported that Freddie had succumbed peacefully due to old age. Forlorn and tearful children mourned at the schoolyard fence where they’d met Freddie so many times before.
Pat Stack, Freddie’s caretaker and best friend, was inconsolable too.
In November 1937—just over a year after Freddie died—Pat also passed away, at the Holy Cross Hospital where he’d lived and worked for 41 years.
It was his 66th birthday, but there was no gala that day. Instead, once again the Salt Lake Tribune, the Salt Lake Telegram, and the Deseret News all reported the sad news from Holy Cross Hospital.
A few days later, esteemed members of the community joined the Sisters and hospital staff for the funeral at the Cathedral of the Madeleine. Pat was laid to his final rest at Mount Calvary Cemetery.
Neither Pat Stack nor Freddie had much, but I suspect the Holy Cross Sisters saw a little seed of something in both lives. They cultivated and nurtured it. It’s what they do.
The good Sisters probably understood the Irish language quite well too. Given Pat’s and Freddie’s story, I’d guess the Sisters’ favorite old Gaelic saying was this one: Is minic a rinne bromach gioblach capall.
It means, “Many a raggy colt made a powerful horse.”
(The Salt Lake Tribune published a version of this story on March 14, 2025.)
(Note: The CommonSpirit health system chose to honor the legacy of the Sisters of the Holy Cross by naming their Utah hospitals after them. The current Holy Cross Hospitals in Utah are no longer affiliated with the Sisters. The Sisters’ only remaining sponsored social justice ministry is Holy Cross Ministries of Utah, a local nonprofit organization that provides health, education and justice services to the underserved communities here in Utah.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
