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Story of Mother Mary's Mountain

Fr. John DuBois

Rev. John DuBois loved St. Mary’s Mountain. He found, high on this mountain, amid the wild flowers, a stream divided and flowed around a great oak where a recessed grotto had formed under the trunk. Here, he erected a rude cross, a symbol of the holy work he was undertaking. This was the original Grotto. He built St. Mary’s Chapel on the Hill church in 1806 on the site of the present Pangborn Memorial Campanile and founded St. Mary’s College and Seminary in 1808. He later became Bishop of New York.

Mother (St.) Elizabeth Ann Seton

​Elizabeth Ann Seton, founder of the first United States women religious order, Sisters of Charity, came to St. Mary’s Mountain in 1809 and also found peace at the Grotto. She and her sisters lived near the Grotto in a log cabinet for six weeks until her home in the Emmitsburg was complete. Every Sunday, Mother Seton and the sisters attended Mass on the mountain.  On Sunday afternoons, Mother Seton seated on a rock known as hers (which is still here today) taught Christian Doctrine to the children of the Mountain Parish. “We would then quench our thirst from a neighboring spring and ramble for a time at the grotto, a wild and picturesque spot…” St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

Fr. Simon Brute

​Rev. Simon Bruté, who later became the bishop of Vincennes, Indiana, was also one of the original stewards of the Grotto. He came to St. Mary’s Mountain in 1812 and blessed the spot with his sense of aesthetics and work ethic. He loved nature, believing the Lord was with us in all aspects of creation. The work he led to clean and beautify the Grotto was his tribute to God’s glory and the paths he laid are now the walkways (Corpus Christi Lane) we walk today. “The beautiful places of the Wilderness (of St. Joseph’s Valley) shall grow fat and the Hills (of Mount St. Mary’s) shall be girded about with joy.” Fr. Simon Bruté

Msgr. Hugh Phillips

Until 1958, the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes was merely a secluded, but very special corner of campus, know to Mount St. Mary’s students, seminarians and rarely visited by outsiders. Monsignor Phillips was appointed director of the National Shrine Grotto of Lourdes in 1958, and was named Grotto Chaplain by the Archdiocese of Baltimore when it was proclaimed a Public Oratory and National Shrine. After completely refurbishing the shrine, he opened it to the public. He was responsible for further enhancing the Grotto with the handsome Pangborn Memorial Campanile crowned with a 25-foot, gold-leafed bronze figure of the Virgin Mary, and other significant statuary monuments throughout the Grotto grounds.

The John Cabin, located below the Pangborn Campanile of our Blessed Mother Mary, is named for John Hughes, an immigrant Irishman, who lived in the cabin in 1819, while supervising the gardens and taking classes in the seminary. Hughes was later ordained to the priesthood and became Bishop John DuBois’s coadjutor in New York City. As Ordinary, he distinguished himself as a leading defender of Catholics in the United States. ​

​The stone wall reproduction of the Lourdes Grotto in France was constructed in 1879 by President Fr. John A. Watterson. Fr. Watterson initiated the project to commemorate the apparitions which had taken place 21 years earlier in France and which had been approved in 1862. (Photo taken by William Henry Tipton, circa 1890s)

​The Pangborn Campanile, which has become a regional landmark, was built in 1964. St. Mary’s Chapel on the Hill opened in 1976. Miller Family Visitors Center opened in 2013.