Marist University and the Brothers on the Hudson

Marist University occupies a remarkable stretch of the eastern Hudson shoreline, and its origin is exactly the kind of story that gets lost inside a campus map: a religious order that came here not to build a university but to pray, and ended up building one anyway.

The Marist Brothers, formally the Little Brothers of Mary, were founded in eighteen seventeen near Lyon, France, by a priest named Marcellin Champagnat who believed that rural French children were being left without any education at all. Champagnat's brothers were not priests; they were laypeople who taught school. The congregation spread across Europe and eventually to the United States, where they established a province in eighteen eighty-six.

In nineteen oh five, the American Marist Brothers purchased a property from a man named Thomas McPherson along the eastern shore of the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie. They named it Saint Ann's Hermitage and used it as a house of formation, a place where young men entering the order could prepare for their vows and their teaching lives. It was a retreat, not a college.

That changed during the Great Depression. With more young men seeking alternatives to a brutal job market and the brothers looking to expand their educational mission, the community opened a college-level training school in nineteen twenty-nine, and New York granted a four-year college charter in nineteen forty-six. The college grew through the twentieth century, became fully coeducational, and in twenty twenty-five officially renamed itself Marist University.

Today the school is known for a communications program that attracts national attention and for a polling institute, the Marist Poll, whose surveys on American politics and public opinion are cited regularly by national news organizations. It has also cultivated a technology partnership with IBM, headquartered nearby in Dutchess County. The campus stretches along the river for roughly a mile, and on the water side you can see the Hudson with its broad curves south toward Poughkeepsie. The Brothers who arrived here in nineteen oh five to pray and prepare teachers probably did not imagine any of this.