The Academy story began nearly two hundred years ago in the parlor of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Paris. There, Bishop Louis DuBourg visited Madeleine Sophie Barat and the group of religious women she had gathered to educate girls in post-revolutionary France. He invited them to come to America and establish schools on the frontier.
In 1818, at age 48, Philippine Duchesne set out with four other nuns on a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and upriver from New Orleans to the tiny village of St. Charles on the Missouri River, 25 miles from St. Louis. There, in a primitive log cabin, Mother Duchesne opened the Academy of the Sacred Heart—the first free school west of the Mississippi, and the first of many Schools of the Sacred Heart in the United States.
Following is an excerpt of HEC-TV’s A Mission to Educate, a video about the history of Catholic education in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. This excerpt describes the Academy’s founding by Philippine Duchesne in 1818.
