Old uniform evokes Mt. Alverno academy
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
The high school uniform pictured at left was worn by Ann Eickholt Heflin, who graduated from the Mount Alverno Academy for high school girls east of Maryville in 1970. Recently donated to the Nodaway County Historical Society Museum by Heflin’s daughter, the uniform is one of several artifacts on display there bearing a connection to the former school and Roman Catholic motherhouse that in 1996 became the Maryville Treatment Center.
The Nodaway County Historical Society Museum at 110 N. Walnut St. in Maryville recently acquired a new artifact that reflects an increasingly forgotten part of the area’s religious and educational history.
A few weeks ago, local resident Karis Heflin Morrow donated her mother’s old Catholic high school uniform to the museum’s permanent collection.
The simple gray blazer and matching blue and gray plaid skirt were worn by Ann Eickholt Heflin, who graduated from the Mount Alverno Academy for high school girls in 1970, the year before the school, operated by the Sisters of St. Francis, closed.
Perched atop a sloping bluff along Highway 136 just east of the One Hundred and Two River, the former motherhouse and school is known today as the Maryville Treatment Center, a minimum-security prison and substance abuse treatment facility operated by the Missouri Department of Corrections.
While most people probably know about the prison, a decreasing number of Nodaway Countians recall that the ornate towered structure sitting on a landscaped 44-acre campus began life as the home of a religious order.
The Sisters of St. Francis of Maryville was a Roman Catholic religious congregation for women that followed the rule of the Third Order of St. Francis. The sisters’ ministry largely consisted of providing medical care, and the order founded hospitals in Missouri and Oklahoma.
Established in 1894, the congregation initially consisted of Mother Mary Augustine Giesen, the first superior general, and six other nuns who came to Maryville from the Sisters of St. Mary motherhouse in St. Louis.
In addition to founding St. Francis Hospital here — then one of only two hospitals in northwest Missouri’s sprawling Platte Purchase region — the fledgling congregation built what is now MTC as a motherhouse of their own, naming it Mount Alverno.
The name is similar to that of the mountain in Italy where, according to church tradition, St. Francis in the year 1224 received stigmata, wounds resembling those inflicted on Jesus Christ during his crucifixion.
In 1963 the sisters opened the high school, which closed less than a decade later in 1971. In the mid-1980s, the Sisters of St. Francis rejoined their parent congregation, the Sisters of St. Mary, and moved their headquarters back to St. Louis.
After that, Mount Alverno went through a couple of owners who floated various schemes for its use, including transforming the building into an apartment complex. Nothing ever quite worked out, and the Department of Corrections acquired the property in 1995.
Heflin’s old school uniform joins a collection of artifacts related to Mount Alverno on permanent display on the museum’s second floor. These include a large scale model of the campus created for “Mother Vicentia” in 1958 by J.J. Kraker & Son and a large framed print of the motherhouse as it appeared in decades past.
The Nodaway County Historical Society Museum is open throughout the summer and fall from 1-4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Tours at other times are available by appointment.
