Greenville Hall of Loyola University (St. Mary’s Dominican College)

St. Mary’s, the first Catholic women’s college in Louisiana, traces its roots to the arrival in 1860 of seven Dominican sisters from Cabra, Ireland, to run a girls’ academy affiliated with St. John the Baptist Church (OR154). With increasing student enrollment and requests for boarding, the sisters purchased this site in 1865 and hired Fitzner to design a building accommodating classrooms, an administrative office, and a chapel. Thomas Mulligan constructed the building, which the Times-Democrat described in August 1882 as in the “style of a dwelling house,” as were many women’s schools and colleges in the nineteenth century. Constructed of cypress, the building is shaded by colonnaded galleries at the front and rear. A narrow gallery surrounding the central cupola provided a place for students to make astronomical observations. In this and other ways, the curriculum was advanced for its time; rhetoric, rarely taught to girls, was part of the course of study in the humanities and science, and a student literary journal was published from 1888 to 1900. In 1911, three ogee-shaped dormers were added to the third story, giving the building a Venetian flavor. St. Mary’s was absorbed by Loyola University in 1984.The building is now used for administrative purposes. Adjoining Greenville Hall is Cabra Hall (1969, J. Buchanon Blitch), a dormitory with an exterior circulation gallery of arched openings, a modernist interpretation of the older building.