NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Mary Fields was a sharp-shooting, whisky-drinking, cigar-puffing, pants-wearing, punch-throwing, six-foot-tall former slave. She also loved the Ursuline Sisters.
Born around 1832, Fields spent the first three decades of her life as a slave in Tennessee. After the war, she remained in domestic service, eventually moving to Florida with the family of Judge Edmund Dunne. Although sources conflict on the details, most agree that when Dunne’s sister, Sarah, left to join the Ursuline Sisters in Toledo, Fields eventually followed her and found work doing odd jobs for the sisters.
Then, in 1884, the Ursulines received a letter from a Jesuit mission in Montana asking their community to take over a school outside Cascade. The Sisters of Providence had begun the school 20 years earlier, on October 17, 1864, but the Jesuits thought the Ursulines more suited to the task. Sarah Dunne (by now Mother Mary Amadeus) left with a small group of Ursulines, but Fields remained behind, serving the community in Toledo, Ohio.
Before the year was out, another letter arrived at the Cleveland convent: Mother Amadeus was dying from pneumonia. Immediately, Fields packed up and headed west to nurse her former mistress back to health. Once Amadeus recovered, she convinced Fields to stay. And stay she did, helping the Ursulines build their new convent, tending their garden, and doing their laundry.
The resident Jesuits, however, did not take kindly to Fields’ hard-drinking, cigar-smoking ways. After she got into yet another brawl (with a man), they ordered the Ursulines to let her go. The sisters reluctantly obeyed, but privately they gave Fields enough money to open a restaurant in town.
When that failed (because Fields gave away food for free), the Ursulines convinced the government to give her the stagecoach mail route from Cascade to the convent. In 1903, as “Stagecoach Mary” Fields approached 70 years of age, she retired from her route and set up shop as a laundress in Cascade. When she died 11 years later, the townspeople buried her alongside the winding road that led to the Ursulines.
