St. Catherine’s Industrial Indian School for Boys, later the coeducational St. Catherine’s Indian School, forms a campus of 19 buildings on the northwest side of Santa Fe adjacent to the Rosario Chapel and Cemetery. The school is a remnant of a contested system of Indian boarding schools, run by missionaries of various Christian religious orders, first developed in nineteenth century New Mexico to educate, assimilate, and “civilize” indigenous children into Euro-American culture. In 1886, Katherine Drexel, a wealthy Pennsylvania heiress, donated funds to the Catholic Indian Bureau to construct the primary school building. Drexel, who later took religious vows and was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000, provided the capital for a string of nearly sixty schools across the country established to educate Native American and African American students. At the time of its construction, the school building was one of the largest adobe buildings in New Mexico and contained the entire school. Over the years, this primary building became the core of a large campus. The campus closed its doors in 1998. The City of Santa Fe now owns the substantial site and plans to adaptively reuse the property.
From Old Santa Fe Today, 5th edition by Audra Bellmore with photographs by Simone Frances.