Saint Mary's College

Saint Mary's College, just across the road from the University of Notre Dame in Saint Joseph County, Indiana, was founded in eighteen forty-four in Bertrand, Michigan, by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, a French congregation of religious women who came at the invitation of Father Edward Sorin and later moved the school to its present site beside Notre Dame, the same priest who had founded Notre Dame two years earlier. The sisters established a school for women at a time when women's higher education was rare and largely unavailable outside convent schools. Saint Mary's grew into one of the oldest Catholic women's colleges in the United States, conferring its first bachelor's degrees in the eighteen eighties.

For generations it operated in close academic partnership with Notre Dame, a relationship that shaped both institutions. Today Saint Mary's enrolls roughly fifteen hundred undergraduate women and continues as an independent college offering a full liberal arts curriculum. Its campus, designed in the collegiate Gothic style that mirrors Notre Dame's, sits along the Saint Joseph River.