Early Ministries
In 1831, Mother Catherine opened Presentation Academy, an all-girl high school in Louisville, Ky. Still located at 861 South Fourth Street, Presentation is the oldest continuously operating high school in the city.
In 1832, Sisters responded to the cholera epidemic by nursing victims and caring for the orphans. The community's early ministries included education in colleges, high schools, and elementary schools. Countless children were given homes in orphanages, and thousands of patients received care in hospitals. Nurses' training schools in hospitals extended the SCN health services. The Sisters also nursed wounded and dying soldiers in four military hospitals in Kentucky during the Civil War and the sick and dying during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. By the close of the nineteenth-century, ministries of the SCNs spread across many cities and states.