St. Vincent's College

In 1838, the Congregation of the Mission, more commonly known as the Vincentians, founded St. Vincent’s Male Academy in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The Academy evolved into St. Vincent’s Seminary and College five years later. Over its 140-year history, the school taught both seminarians for the Catholic priesthood and secular students.

From the beginning of their presence in Cape Girardeau, the Vincentians owned, purchased, and sold human beings, and also hired their labor from other Catholic enslavers in the community, adopting practices established at St. Mary's of the Barrens Seminary in nearby Perryville, Missouri, where the Vincentians had been active since 1818. The College relied on slavery until its abolition in 1865. Even as the number of people directly owned by the Vincentians declined, the priests continued to hire enslaved workers. After Emancipation, many newly freed Black residents of Cape Girardeau found employment in the College's laundry or on its two farms.

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 the St. Vincent's College (Cape Girardeau, Missouri) records, are open for in-person research use at DePaul University Special Collections and Archives in Chicago, Illinois.