Duchesne Academy

The school's name honors Rose Philippine Duchesne, born at Grenoble in 1769. She entered the Visitation order in 1788 and in 1804 brought her community into Madeleine-Sophie Barat's Society of the Sacred Heart. In 1818 she and four sisters sailed on the Rebecca, ten weeks to New Orleans, and opened a free school at St. Charles, Missouri, the first west of the Mississippi. In 1841 De Smet invited the sisters to a Potawatomi mission in eastern Kansas, where she was called Quahkahkanumad, Woman Who Prays Always. She died at St. Charles in 1852 and was canonized in 1988.

What the plaque says

Duchesne Academy In October, 1881, Mother Margaret Dunne and three religious of the Sacred Heart opened a boarding school for girls at a temporary location on Ninth and Howard in Omaha. On September 1, 1882, Bishop James O'Connor sold Park Place, a 12-acre site "west of town," to the sisters for the sum of one dollar. Building construction commenced in February, and in November the Academy of the Sacred Heart opened to seventeen boarders. On Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913, a devastating tornado demolished the north wing of the school. Reconstruction took a full year and changed the front entrance to the present circle drive. The school was approved for college courses in 1916, and in 1920 the Academy became Duchesne College and Convent of the Sacred Heart. Both college and grade school closed in the 1960's having educated thousands of students, pre-school through college. Today Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart continues as a Catholic, four-year, college preparatory, high school for women. It exemplifies a tradition of religious commitment and builds on the educational excellence of the women religious who first came to this "frontier post in the far west." The Class of 1981 Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Joslyn Art Museum — 1.2 mi
  Omaha's free art museum, a 1931 Art Deco memorial with two modern pavilions, and the keeper of Karl Bodmer's watercolors from the upper Missouri in 1833 and 1834.
• Malcolm X Birthsite — 1.7 mi
  The North Omaha lot where Malcolm Little was born in May 1925 and his family was driven out by the Klan, saved by Rowena Moore and now planned as a cultural center.
• The Durham Museum (Omaha Union Station) — 2.3 mi
  Omaha's 1931 Union Station, Gilbert Stanley Underwood's Art Deco depot for the Union Pacific, closed to trains in 1971 and kept as a city museum with its waiting room intact.
• Winter Quarters and the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery — 4.7 mi
  The Latter-day Saint camp of 1846 to 1848 on Omaha land in what is now Florence, where hundreds died the first winter, and the cemetery and trail center beside it.

More markers nearby

• George and Sarah Joslyn Home — 0.5 mi
• Historic Prospect Hill--Omaha's Pioneer Cemetery — 0.8 mi
• Poynter Hall — 0.9 mi
• Kountze Memorial Lutheran Church — 1.0 mi