Jim Bradshaw: Sacred Heart Academy may be Grand Coteau's second miracle

As the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau began the celebration last month of its 200th year of teaching young ladies of south Louisiana, it caused us to think about the remarkable story of how it has survived war, epidemics, and fire to become the oldest school in America west of the Mississippi River.
It is the only school taught by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus worldwide that can claim an unbroken history stretching over two centuries.
Mother Eugénie Audé and Sister Mary Layton opened the school with only five students on Oct. 5, 1821, in what was described as “a simple frame building fifty-five feet square surrounded by a veranda” on 50 acres donated by Mrs. Charles Smith.
She also paid for the two sisters to travel from St. Charles, Missouri, to open the convent and girl’s school.
That first campus has now expanded to more than 250 acres that was described nearly 70 years later, in 1889, as “the commodious three-story Academy … complete in every appointment, neat in every detail,” standing in “a beautiful grove of oaks” and offering “every facility for the instruction of girls and young ladies.”
But that tribute did not come without some tribulations.
An article 100 years ago, at the time of the Academy’s centennial celebration, noted, “The hardships of the beginning were severe and many, but in spite of them the school grew and prospered. … In 1830 the present substantial brick building was begun, additions were made in 1834 and 1835, it was finally completed in 1851. During this period the avenues of oak and pine trees were planted and the beautiful grounds laid out.”
Its relative isolation helped protect the academy during yellow fever epidemics that periodically swept through south Louisiana in the middle and late 1800s.
Ten percent of a town’s population could be killed in a week when the sickness struck. Eight thousand people died in New Orleans in 1853, and towns linked to it by steamboats were equally hard hit.
Washington, not far from Grand Coteau, has a cemetery still called the “Yellow Fever Cemetery” because so many victims were buried there in 1853.
Grand Coteau was not a steamboat town. It had its outbreaks, but usually not as often or as bad.
Coincidence helped keep the Academy open in 1863, when a large Union army under Gen. Nathaniel Banks poured into south Louisiana.
Banks, who made his headquarters at Grand Coteau for a short time, knew about the Sisters of the Sacred Heart because his daughter was a pupil at their school in New York City. The headmistress there was Sister Alaysia Hardy, who had been one of the first students to come to Grand Coteau when the Academy opened.
When she heard that federal troops were marching on Grand Coteau, Mother Hardy asked Mrs. Banks to tell her husband to look after the nuns there.
As a result, he issued orders protecting the school and provided the nuns and their pupils with coffee, corn meal, flour, sugar, tea and salt.
Quick aid from nearby St. Charles College averted disaster when fire struck in 1920.
A Lafayette newspaper reported on Oct. 23, 1920, “Heroic work by the faculty and students at St. Charles College and citizens generally saved the Sacred Heart Academy and Normal School from destruction by fire Wednesday afternoon, when the flames, originating in the electric plant, destroyed the plant, the kitchen and the store room in the rear of the convent. … It is regarded as exceedingly fortunate that their efforts were sufficient to save the main building.”
Frances Helt, a student at the Academy, gave an account to the paper.
“At the time the fire was discovered,” according to the story, “which Miss Helt believes originated in an explosion in the boiler room, all of the students, with the exception of those on the sick list, were out for a walk. It was feared that the main building would also catch fire … [and] the furnishings in the building were removed by citizens who answered the call, together with the student body of St. Charles, who did splendid work fighting the flames and preventing their spread.”
It took two hours to put the fire out. The kitchen and an adjoining store room were completely destroyed, “the latter being heavily stocked with provisions for the approaching winter months.”
There were other tribulations — the Great Depression, hurricanes, more recently the pandemic.
But an unadorned chapel on the campus reminds us that this was also the place where, doctors testified, a young girl on her deathbed was restored to full health for no reason they could find except for the intercession of St. John Berchmans.
That healing has been called the Miracle of Grand Coteau, but looking back through the two centuries of its existence, it isn’t far-fetched to wonder if there isn’t also something a bit miraculous simply in the academy’s survival for all these years.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.