Ursuline Academy

Twelve French Ursuline nuns sailed to Louisiana in 1727 and founded a school that has never closed. It is the oldest continuously operating school for girls in the United States, and the oldest Catholic school in the country. They came to educate girls and nurse the sick in a swamp colony where the French were still figuring out how not to starve. The nuns survived the 1788 Great Fire that destroyed most of New Orleans. What they built was the first convent, the first free school, and the first retreat center for women in the city. They also offered the first classes for enslaved African-American women, free women of color, and Native American women — alongside white students. In colonial Louisiana, that was not how schools worked. The Ursulines did it anyway. The original French Colonial convent still stands at 1100 Chartres Street in the French Quarter. Built in 1752, it is the oldest building in the Mississippi Valley — older than the nation, older than the Purchase, a structure that watched the city burn and change hands and survive. You can tour it. The rooms are spare and cool. The order itself never left. The current campus moved to State Street in 1912 and still educates students from toddlers through twelfth grade under the trusteeship of the Ursuline Sisters of the New Orleans Community. Nearly three centuries of nuns teaching girls in a city that has drowned and burned and been rebuilt more times than anyone wants to count. The convent on Chartres Street is the proof they were here first and stayed.