Dominican Sisters Congregation of the Sacred Heart

Mother Agnes Magevney and her sisters met hostility in Galveston, where many people saw them as northerners. At Bishop Gallagher's request they opened Holy Rosary School in 1887, a free school for Black children, and the antagonism grew. Parents of Sacred Heart Academy pupils threatened to withdraw their children unless it closed. The sisters refused, and both schools prospered, the Handbook of Texas says. In 1893 they opened another free school, for children of the cathedral parish. The sisters moved their motherhouse to Houston in 1926, after the island's storms.

What the plaque says

Dominican Sisters Congregation of the Sacred Heart At the request of Galveston Bishop Nicholas Aloysius Gallagher, Dominican Sister Mary Agnes Magevney and Mother Rose Lynch left their Sacred Heart Convent in Somerset, Ohio, to staff a school in Galveston in 1882. Twenty sisters including Sister Agnes and Mother Rose arrived in Galveston on September 29, 1882. Horse-drawn carriages brought them from the railroad station to a 2-story home here owned by St. Mary's Cathedral. They established a convent and opened Sacred Heart Academy on October 9, 1882. Mother Agnes died in 1891 and was succeeded in the office of Superior of Sacred Heart by Mother Pauline Gannon. Severe damage to the Sacred Heart Convent in the storm of 1900 eventually resulted in its relocation to the Adoue Home at 16th and Postoffice in 1927. A new Sacred Heart Academy, known as the Dominican High School, was built at the corner of Postoffice and 15th in 1940. A school for girls operated there until 1968, when the house was leased to O'Connell High School, created by a merger of the Kirwin High School for Boys and the Ursuline and dominican School for Girls. The Dominican Sisters moved to a new convent in 1974. They presently serve numerous dioceses and archdioceses in Texas, California, and Guatemala. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1892 Bishop's Palace — 0.4 mi
  Nicholas Clayton's stone house on Broadway for the railroad lawyer Walter Gresham, later home to Galveston's Catholic bishops and one of the most admired Victorian houses in the country.
• The Strand — 0.5 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 0.5 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 0.7 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• Homesite of Dr. William Keiller — steps away
• Galveston Immigration Stations — steps away
• Jean Lafitte — 0.2 mi
• Near Campsites of Louis-Michel Aury and Francisco Xavier Mina — 0.2 mi