1909-1919

The start of Cardinal Gibbons High School as Sacred Heart High School in 1909 and the growth of the Catholic Church in Raleigh were closely interwoven. That combined story traces its roots to 1821 when the Rt. Rev. Bishop John England started a congregation for the dozen or so Catholics in the city at that time.

By the 1870s, Raleigh’s Catholic population had grown to approximately 100, triggering talks of the need for a school to help parents pass on Catholicism to their children.  To help accommodate this desire Fr. James White, the congregation’s pastor, in 1879 purchased the Pulaski-Cowper Mansion on Hillsborough Street. At the same time, John the Baptist Church was renamed Sacred Heart Church and the burgeoning Catholic community was christened Sacred Heart Parish.

Among the band of tireless priests who established missions in the state was Fr. Thomas F. Price, the first native North Carolinian to be ordained a Catholic priest. In 1899, Fr. Price, along with his sister, Sister Mary Agnes of the Sisters of Mercy, founded the Catholic Orphanage at Nazareth on a large tract of land on Nazareth Street. The orphanage housed both high and elementary schools, which initially served just boys and later girls as well. 

In 1909, Msgr. Thomas Griffin and four Dominican Sisters of Newburgh, New York, opened Sacred Heart High School, along with Sacred Heart Parochial School, within the Pulaski-Cowper Mansion. The former was the first Catholic high school in North Carolina and the latter was one of the state’s first Catholic elementary schools. The names of three of the four Dominican Sisters are: Sr. Mary Dolorita, O.P. (who died in 1962), Sr. Mary Clementine, O.P., and Sister Mary Leonella, O.P. The name of the fourth sister is not known.

Approximately 50 students, grades one through nine, attended classes in the lower rooms; the upper rooms served as a convent and dormitory. The first graduating class in 1912 was comprised of three students. The original three freshmen – later identified as Mrs. Graham Andrews, Mr. William Keyes, and Mrs. Herman Wolff, graduated at the old opera house in downtown Raleigh. Due to the flu epidemic that spread across the country in 1918, Sacred Heart High School was forced to close for the 1918-1919 school year.