Notre Dame Catholic School

The three sisters who opened the school came from a congregation already deep in teaching. The Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word had opened St. Joseph's Orphanage in San Antonio by 1874 and their first school there, San Fernando School, in 1875; by 1891 they taught in twenty-two towns and cities in Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin and Mexico. In 1897 they bought 280 acres from George W. Brackenridge for a new motherhouse. The order divided into four provinces in 1921, and at its 1969 centennial the San Antonio Province ran fifty-two elementary and secondary schools and Incarnate Word College.

What the plaque says

NOTRE DAME CATHOLIC SCHOOL Fourteen visiting priests served St. Mary's Catholic Mission Church until 1911, when it became a parish church and Father Henry Kemper of Chicago became its resident priest. Father Kemper was ordained in 1910, when it was thought his death from tuberculosis was imminent. He went to St. Mary's Sanitarium in Boerne and learned of the growing Catholic congregation in Kerrville. He would spend the rest of his life building what would become Notre Dame Catholic Parish and School into a large and giving community with many people devoted to Christian service. After acquiring eight adjoining lots and two houses, Father Kemper applied to the archdiocese in San Antonio for the construction of a school serving first through twelfth grades. An advertisement stated that tuition would be "one dollar a month and free to the poor." Twenty-seven pupils and three nuns from the sisters of charity of incarnate word, Sisters Cresentia, Dymphna and Ita, opened the school on August 28, 1912. Enrollment tripled by the end of the year. Originally called St. Mary's, the school was renamed to honor Father Kemper's revered alma mater, Notre Dame University. The school served the community with night courses in music, languages and art. During World War I, the school taught stenography and bookkeeping to ladies who filled needed jobs on the home front. In order to remain open during the great depression, the school downsized to eight grades and the night school was closed. When Father Kemper died in 1957, the front page headline of the Kerrville daily times proclaimed "death takes hill country benefactor." For more than a century, Notre Dame Catholic School has trained up young people and served its community. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Schreiner Mansion — steps away
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Treue der Union Monument — 14 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 19 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.
• Frontier Times Museum — 22 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.

More markers nearby

• Notre Dame Catholic Church — steps away
• Saint Peter's Episcopal Church — steps away
• Kerrville Telephone Company — steps away
• Kerrville Mountain Sun — steps away