College of the Holy Cross
Near Worcester, Massachusetts
On the hill above you sits the oldest Catholic college in New England, founded in eighteen forty-three under circumstances that say everything about nineteenth-century American religious anxiety.
Benedict Joseph Fenwick, the second Bishop of Boston, wanted a Catholic college for his flock. Boston's Protestant establishment made that difficult in the city itself. So Fenwick turned forty-five miles west to Worcester, a smaller manufacturing town more willing to accommodate. He purchased land from a priest named James Fitton on February second, eighteen forty-three, a snow-covered hillside he called Mount Saint James. The school opened that November with a small handful of students.
Three years later there were a hundred. The intellectual ambitions were serious from the start. Holy Cross ran a rigorous classical curriculum at a moment when most New England colleges viewed Catholic education as a threat to Protestant culture.
The school's first graduating class in eighteen forty-nine produced one of the most remarkable figures in American Catholic history. James Augustine Healy graduated first in his class and later became the first African-American bishop in the United States, ordained Bishop of Portland, Maine, in eighteen seventy-five. That fact was quietly suppressed for generations because Healy could pass as white, and the Diocese of Portland did not publicize his heritage during his lifetime.
Women were admitted beginning in nineteen seventy-two. Holy Cross has remained a liberal arts college in the Jesuit tradition, never expanding into a research university, a deliberate choice that has kept its undergraduate focus intact.
The college sits on a compact campus of roughly two hundred acres. It has produced more than a few notable alumni, including Clarence Thomas, class of nineteen seventy-one, and a long succession of judges, senators, and theologians. The hill it occupies was a strategic military position during the Civil War, when Union troops drilled on its slopes before shipping south.
