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.)
How did the Holy Cross Sisters achieve so much so quickly in their remarkable Utah ministry that started 150 years ago? One explanation may be that many of the pioneer sisters who trekked west had earned their stripes as Civil War nurses.
The Holy Cross Sisters first arrived in Utah from their convent in Notre Dame, Indiana on June 6, 1875. Sister Raymond (Mary) Sullivan and Sister Augusta (Amanda) Anderson traveled to Salt Lake City via train and stagecoach at the invitation of Father Lawrence Scanlan (soon to be Utah’s 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.
A woman named Sister Holy Cross (Susan) Walsh and several others arrived soon after the first two. With their trademark energy and industriousness, in just a few months these Holy Cross Sisters had started both a school and a hospital in Salt Lake.
Over the next century and a half, 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.
Battle-tested nuns like Sister Augusta and Sister Holy Cross were more than ready to face these daunting challenges.
Sister Augusta (later known as Mother Augusta after she was elected to lead the entire congregation in 1882) was born in 1830 in Virginia. She joined the Holy Cross Sisters in 1854.
Sister Holy Cross was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1826 and took her final vows in 1858. Neither she nor Sister Augusta was a nurse at the time they joined the religious order.
In fact, the nursing ministry of the Holy Cross Sisters did not start until October 1861 when Indiana’s governor requested that the Sisters help care for soldiers wounded in the Civil War.
Their leader at the time—Mother Angela—took a group of volunteers to help at a Union army military hospital in Kentucky. The Sisters did so well there that President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War asked them to take on other assignments.
Sister Augusta later wrote in her journal, “We were not trained as nurses, but our hearts made our hands willing, with God’s help we did much to alleviate the dreadful suffering.”
Sister Augusta managed two Union army hospitals during the Civil War so capably that General Ulysses S. Grant once remarked, “What a wonderful woman she is! She can control the men better than I can.”
One of the first assignments Sister Augusta and Sister Holy Cross tackled together was at the Mound City military installation taking shape in 1861-62 near Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
After a 1842 visit to the same site, the writer Charles Dickens had called the place a “detestable morass.” A Holy Cross Sister described even more appalling conditions when the nurse-nuns arrived there two decades later:
“Every room on the first floor was strewn with human legs and arms. As the wounded were brought in from the battlefield, they were laid anywhere, and amputations took place. Some of the wards resembled a slaughterhouse, the walls were so splattered with blood…”
What happened next? “[The Sisters] immediately pinned up their habits and swept and scrubbed the hospital wards until they were clean.”
The Holy Cross Sisters eventually converted a collection of unfinished warehouses into a new and efficient 1,500 bed military hospital. Soon after, they were inundated with over 2,000 casualties from both sides in the Battle of Shiloh.
Father William Corby—president of the University of Notre Dame and before that chaplain of the Irish Brigade that famously fought at the Battle of Gettysburg—noted their devotion: “The labors and self sacrifices of the Sisters during the war need no praise here. Their praise is on the lips of every surviving soldier who experienced their kind and careful administrations.”
By the end of the Civil War, about 80 Holy Cross sisters had served as wartime nurses. They helped start the nursing profession as we know it today, with a strict focus on proper staffing, sterile conditions, and using the right equipment and supplies.
Three Holy Cross Sisters even boarded the Union hospital ship Red Rover in 1862 and sailed the Mississippi and Ohio treating war victims as needed. They are recognized as the forerunners of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps.
All this hard wartime work was the foundation for the 19 hospitals the Holy Cross congregation would operate over the next 130+ years. One of them was the Holy Cross Hospital founded in downtown Salt Lake City in 1875.
Sister Holy Cross was in charge, a job she would hold for 20 years. On October 23, 1875, the Salt Lake Tribune reported:
“Sisters’ Hospital. The sisters of the Holy Cross will open their hospital for the reception of patients on next Monday the 25th. The building to be occupied by them is a large new two-and-a-half-story brick structure, situated on Fifth East street, between South and First South Streets, Salt Lake City. It stands on a full-size lot shaded with fruit trees, is furnaced with gas, thoroughly ventilated, and in all respects suited for the purpose intended. It will be under the immediate supervision of the sisters themselves; who will spare no pains in nursing the sick and doing everything in their power to promote the health and comfort of those under their charge. There is provision also for a female department.”
The actual conditions were not nearly so rosy, as explained by a priest who eulogized Sister Holy Cross during her 1898 memorial mass in Utah:
“There she labored, most devotedly, and under the most trying circumstances for seven years. With only one sister to assist, they had at times as many as 50 patients to be watched, cared for and nursed. Often to meet pressing demands, she gave up her own apartments, and slept on the floor: still oftener she would be a whole week without rest, or sleep, say perhaps a few hours in the day, when she would trust her patients to other hands. Her broad charity, tempered with the greatest patience, and entirely devoid of selfishness, won for her, the affection, love, goodwill, and generous support from all who knew her.”
No doubt she’d seen worse during her three years of Civil War duty, and so she persevered. Under her guidance, Holy Cross Hospital thrived, relocated, and in 1881 built a brand new state-of-the-art building a few blocks away.
In an article published on May 22, 1897, the Deseret News—owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—called Holy Cross a “great” hospital and wrote how it was “one of the leading institutions of that Class in the West.”
Sister Holy Cross was called to return to the Indiana motherhouse in 1896 to serve as mistress of novices (new members). She died in Indiana in January 1898 at the age of 71.
Utah newspapers noted the sad news and mourned her with tributes like: “She was patient beyond endurance,” and “Her simple guileless nature won for her the good will of all, whilst her love for suffering humanity, and peace to mankind, softened the hearts of many a wayward child.”
Sister Holy Cross—the girl from Ireland named Susan Walsh—was buried in the convent’s Our Lady of Peace cemetery. An extra gravestone recognizes her service as a U.S. Army Nurse to a grateful nation during time of war.
Better late than never, in October 2016, the United States Department of the Army awarded the Civil War Campaign Medal to the Sisters of the Holy Cross for “their essential role in caring for the many wounded and sick soldiers and sailors who fought in the Western Theatre during the war.”
The award letter noted the truth of the words inscribed on the “Nuns of the Battlefield” monument standing at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington: “THEY COMFORTED THE DYING, NURSED THE WOUNDED, CARRIED HOPE TO THE IMPRISONED, GAVE IN HIS NAME A DRINK OF WATER TO THE THIRSTY.”
(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.
