Loretto Roots Tour 2025 rolls along mighty Mississippi to visit Loretto sites

The latest Loretto Roots tour took seven Loretto members to the sites and scenes of early Loretto along the Mississippi River. Leaving the Motherhouse in Nerinx, Ky., the first stops were Reelfoot Lake, Tenn., and New Madrid, Mo., sites of the 1811-12 earthquake which shook up Loretto’s earliest members at the very beginning of the Little Society of the Friends of Mary Beneath the Cross of Jesus. Imagine deciding whether to become a Sister just as aftershocks shake the ground beneath your feet!

From our rented cabin on Reelfoot Lake we boarded a pontoon boat to learn how the lake was formed by the earthquake more than 200 years ago. The New Madrid Fault is still one of the most active and threatening of earthquake regions on the continent. Reelfoot is also the site of a stunning reestablishment of nesting eagles and egrets, as well as home to happy turtles and flying fish.

Upstream from New Madrid at Cape Girardeau, Mo., Loretto’s St. Vincent’s Academy opened in 1838 just four years after the Academy at Loretto Motherhouse opened in Rhodes Hall. St. Vincent parochial school was opened soon after. St. Vincent parish records still hold evidence of Loretto slaveholding in the area. The parish cemetery celebrates the Sisters of Loretto. Several Cape Girardeau students joined Loretto, like Vicki Quatmann SL and Judy Popp SL. Vicki’s younger sister, Cathy Quatmann Stoverinck, still lives in nearby Jackson, Mo. She caught up with the Loretto Roots group just north of town to share some of her extensive knowledge of area history and show us where the Cherokee native peoples crossed the county on their Trail of Tears.

North of Cape Girardeau, we looked for the jewel of this Loretto Roots tour, the first Loretto foundation beyond Missouri. Bethlehem School and Convent, established in 1823, was just a stone’s throw from the seminary of the Vincentian Fathers. The two establishments shared a great deal over the years: mutual support, affection for Father  Charles Nerinckx, Loretto’s priest-founder who was buried at Bethlehem, the skills of scholars and music of students, and the traded labors of each establishment’s slave families. All that remains today is a bronze plaque and the faith in many local hearts.

A short distance north of Bethlehem is Sainte Genevieve, Mo., which calls itself “the oldest permanent European settlement west of the Mississippi” – true only if you don’t count the earlier Spanish settlements farther west. Ste. Genevieve is where Father Nerinckx died in 1824, just a couple of months after he left Kentucky.  It is also the 1837 site of another early Loretto school, in a building that still stands, restored to the original in a town filled with the charm of the earliest French settlement.  

From Ste. Genevieve we rode a ferry to the Illinois side of the big Mississippi, where historic sites around Prairie Du Rocher recreate the feel of the decade before Loretto when Father Stephen Badin and Father Nerinckx traveled to this farthest western reach of their missionary territory to minister to French-speaking settlers. French Canadians were the first Europeans to make contact with Native Americans along the Mississippi  and the first to “govern” the land that is now Illinois and Missouri.

Turning eastward toward Kentucky, we went by way of Vincennes, Ind., a French settlement captured by the British in the Revolutionary War. Soldiers from Kentucky under the command of George Rogers Clark (age about 25!) made an heroic winter march across the wetlands of Illinois to retake the settlement from the British and save the mid-western territory for the new United States.  

This journey took us six days. The hoped-for result is that our Loretto roots are planted even more deeply in our hearts. Interested in future Loretto Roots Tours? Contact Sister Eleanor Craig SL at Loretto Motherhouse.