Mitchell Hamline library housed in former Catholic school

If you look closely at the north side of the library building at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, you might notice the words “Our Lady of Peace” etched in the lintels above some of the doorways. A thoughtful observer might correctly suspect a Catholic origin of the building, but Our Lady of Peace High School was only the last of the Catholic institutions there.

In 1887, Archbishop John Ireland purchased two lots at the corner of Portland and Victoria as the site for a new cathedral, centrally located between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Then, he changed his mind. Instead, nearby residents were saved from having to commute all the way to downtown for Mass on foot and by streetcar when St. Luke’s Church was built there in 1888. As St. Paul grew, so did St. Luke’s. The parish opened its first school in 1904 with 160 students. In 1916, Father James Byrne became pastor. He set to work on building a new church at Summit and Lexington almost immediately to accommodate the families that spilled out of the church and onto the sidewalk at five Sunday Masses.

The Great Depression brought widespread unemployment to St. Paul, but St. Luke’s continued to grow. In 1930, 100 new applicants were turned away from the parish school due to lack of room. Father Byrne realized that he could help solve both problems by funding a new school building. By this time, Father Byrne had become a monsignor, vicar general and superintendent of Catholic schools, and he sought to build a state-of-the-art building that would fit in with the neighborhood and live up to the highest values of the Catholic Church. He voluntarily raised the cost of the school to $260,000 (at least $3.6 million today) to pay the men who worked on the project a living wage.

At the school’s grand opening in 1931, Msgr. Byrne read a telegram from Pope Pius XI lauding the “model school.” The newspaper highlighted the two-room kindergarten with a “model playhouse, sand boxes, charts, and miniature chairs for the little folks.” Even the superintendent of St. Paul’s public schools called it the best grade school in the state. The new school had 17 classrooms and 620 students. Still, by 1950 the parish had outgrown the school once again. The following year a new school building opened next to the church on Summit Avenue, and the old school was sold to the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Dubuque, Iowa.

The BVM sisters began the building’s final Catholic chapter as Our Lady of Peace High School for girls in 1951. By 1956, the sisters were already in need of more space for students as they completed the first of two additions to the school, making room for 1,000 young women with a new auditorium, assembly room and classrooms for fine arts and theater. Then, as the number of Catholic youngsters shrank, the school shut its doors in 1973, and its students dispersed to other Catholic high schools.

After the school closed, the sisters looked to sell the building. Benjamin E. Mays Learning Center made an offer, intending to turn the building into an interracial grade school. Citing concerns about the school’s finances, the sisters accepted a less lucrative offer from William Mitchell College of Law. Accusations of racial bias filled local newspapers, and William Mitchell rescinded its offer. However, five months later, the sisters accepted a subsequent offer from the law school, an organization that local Catholics believed would anchor the neighborhood and preserve its unique character.

Luiken is a historian with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and a lifelong Catholic in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.