Saint Mary's Seminary

The Basilian Fathers ran the school at first, and it served as a boarding high school and college as well as a seminary. A cement building of 1908 took the lay students, a seminary farm west of La Porte supplied its food and dairy products, and Andrew Jackson Houston, son of Sam Houston, gave the seminarians military training in World War I. In 1920 the original wooden hotel was put on rollers and dragged by mules inland. The large Kirwin Memorial Chapel of 1927 was paid for mostly with money raised by Louis J. Reicher, later bishop of Austin.

What the plaque says

Saint Mary's Seminary When the Rev. Nicholas Gallagher became third bishop of Galveston in 1882, most Roman Catholic priests in the Diocese were natives of other states or countries. Realizing the need for a diocesan seminary to train young Texans for the priesthood, Bishop Gallagher founded St. Mary's Seminary School for Boys. The school opened in the fall of 1901 with 30 grammar school-age boys and 6 seminarians. St. Mary's Seminary was located at this site in La Porte's Sylvan Beach Hotel, once a majestic resort center, which had been heavily damaged in the 1900 hurricane. Over the years, increased enrollment necessitated the construction of additional facilities. Under the leadership of the Rev. James Kirwin, who served as president from 1911 until his death in 1926, St. Mary's became nationally known for its academic excellence. In 1926, the seminary was awarded university status, with the right to confer academic degrees. Many of its alumni, including more than 6 we became bishops, have served as prominent church leaders. In 1954, the school relocated to Houston and eventually merged with St. Thomas University in that city. The chapel continues to serve the members of St. Mary's parish in La Porte. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 7.8 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Space Center Houston — 8.9 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• Emancipation Park — 22 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 23 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• La Porte — 0.9 mi
• Gribble-Hofheinz House — 1.0 mi
• New Washington — 1.1 mi
• Bay Ridge / Morgan's Point — 1.3 mi