Osage Catholic Mission

By 1883 there was agitation to change the name Osage Mission, which suggested the place was still an Indian mission. One proposal, Neona, would have honored the daughter of the Osage chief Little Bear, but local protest favored St. Paul, chosen by voters on April 11, 1895. The name most probably honors St. Paul of the Cross, founder of the Passionists, whose order had just established a house in the town. Father John Schoenmakers, who founded the mission on April 28, 1847, served the Osage for 36 years and is buried a quarter mile east of the church.

What the plaque says

Osage Catholic Mission This mission was founded in 1847 for Osage Indians living along the Neosho and Verdigris rivers. A manual labor school for boys was established by the Jesuits and a department for girls by the Sisters of Loretto. Highest recorded enrollment was 239. In 1848 the first Catholic church in southern Kansas was built. During the Civil War when property was laid waste throughout the border the mission was always spared and school was never suspended. When the Osages moved to Indian territory in 1870 white children gradually replaced the Indians. The school became St. Francis Institution for boys and St. Ann's Academy for girls. St. Francis closed in 1891 and St. Ann's was destroyed by fire in 1895. Notable in service here were Mother Bridget Hayden and Fathers John Schoenmakers, John Bax and Paul Mary Ponziglione, the latter an Italian nobleman. A town, Osage Mission, organized in 1867, became St. Paul in 1895. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum — 20 mi
  Chanute's museum of the hometown singer and the jeweler's son who filmed the South Seas, East Africa and Borneo for paying audiences, and of the West African art that now shares their building.
• Big Brutus — 21 mi
  A 16-story electric coal shovel parked in 1974 where it stopped digging, among the flooded strip pits and reclaimed grassland of the Cherokee County coal field.
• Miners Hall Museum — 25 mi
  Franklin's museum of the Crawford County coal camps and their immigrant families, and of the December 1921 morning the miners' wives marched to shut the mines.
• Fort Scott National Historic Site — 34 mi
  An 1840s army post on the old Missouri border where officers kept enslaved servants, and where twenty years later the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry was mustered onto the parade ground.

More markers nearby

• Osage Nation — 7.7 mi
• The Legend of Greenbush — 10.0 mi
• Fort Scott — 34 mi