St. Mary's of the Barrens Seminary, Perryville, Missouri

In 1815, French-born Louis William Valentine DuBourg, a Sulpician missionary and Bishop of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, invited a group of Italian Vincentian priests to serve in the vast diocese, which encompassed the entirety of the Louisiana Purchase as well as the Florida peninsula and the Gulf Coast. Families in Perryville, Missouri, seventy-five miles south of St. Louis, had purchased land and offered it to DuBourg on the condition that the diocesan seminary that he planned to establish admit and educate lay students as well as students studying for the priesthood. In addition to the land, the families had also pledged funds to help construct the seminary buildings. Among the Vincentian priests who answered DuBourg’s call were Felix de Andreis and Joseph Rosati, who would eventually be elevated to Bishop of St. Louis. Rosati and the other Vincentians sojourned for nearly two years in Bardstown, Kentucky, with Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget, another Sulpician and an enslaver, before traveling, in 1818, to St. Louis to fulfill DuBourg’s plan to establish a seminary and minister to the Catholics in the area.

From the very start, human beings held in bondage were present at what would become St. Mary’s of the Barrens Seminary. DuBourg provided the Vincentians with several enslaved people, and Rosati, who was appointed Superior upon the death of de Andreis, purchased additional enslaved people over the years. By 1830, St. Mary's of the Barrens was one of the largest enslavers in Perry County. The labor of these enslaved individuals was exploited to build and maintain Vincentian operations in Perryville and, later, St. Vincent's College in Cape Girardeau. While the selected letters from the Rev. Charles L. Souvay papers offer glimpses into the Seminary’s early days, as well as Vincentian slaveholding practices and sentiments, the records presented here are largely financial in nature and record day-to-day operational transactions at the Seminary. In the 1840s, the number of enslaved persons at St. Mary’s of the Barrens declined under the direction of John Timon, later Bishop of Buffalo, but the Seminary continued to hire enslaved labor from local enslavers as late as 1864.

Each record in this digital collection was read by a DePaul University Special Collections and Archives staff member. References to slaveholding and Black individuals were transcribed whenever found. For more information about how to use the records, metadata, and transcriptions, please see: How to Use. Although some records were not found to contain references to slavery, they are still presented here, as references may have been unintentionally missed.

The records available here, as well as undigitized records from St. Mary's of the Barrens Seminary records and Rev. John Timon, C.M. provincial records, are open for in-person research use at DePaul University Special Collections and Archives in Chicago, Illinois.