The Ohio Memory Scrapbook:
A Bicentennial Project

Benvin Sansbury, O.P.

1797-1873
Founder of the Dominican Sisters of St. Mary of the Springs

Sister Benvin Sansbury, OP, was born in Prince Georges County, Maryland, and became a Dominican sister in 1823 at Cartwright Creek, Kentucky. In 1830, at the request of Bishop Edward Fenwick, of the fledgling Catholic diocese of Cincinnati, Sr. Benvin Sansbury along with three other Dominican Sisters came to Somerset, OH. The four sisters traveled for three weeks to reach the settlement in Somerset, where they arrived on February 5, 1830. There they founded St. Mary’s Academy, one of the first Catholic schools in Ohio. This academy offered education to pioneer children of Catholics and non Catholics. Mother Angela Gillespie, first Mother General of the Holy Cross Sisters in America was educated here, as was her cousin Ellen Ewing, daughter of Senator Ewing and wife of General William Tecumseh Sherman. General Phil Sheridan’s sister was also a pupil.

Sr. Benvin Sansbury, along with the other three sisters, had to oversee the establishment of the Academy and support the growing community of sisters in Somerset. They had to farm to feed themselves and their students as well as teach. Her remains are buried on the grounds of St. Mary of the Springs, along with the other original pioneer sisters.

In 1866, a devastating fire consumed the buildings of the Academy, leaving the sisters with nothing but spared lives. Sr. Benvin wrote the “brown paper annals” in an attempt to leave some written legacy of the history of the early settlement. The sisters occupied borrowed space for two years until Theodore Leonard, a Columbus businessman, who had five daughters to educate, offered the sisters land on his old brickyard if they would build an academy in Columbus. Sr. Benvin and the other sisters traveled by covered wagon to found St. Mary’s Academy, in Columbus in 1868. It operated until 1966.

Anne O’Hare McCormick

1880–1954
Famous St. Mary of the Springs Academy Graduate

Anne O’Hare McCormick received her formal education at St. Mary of the Springs Academy from 1893 until 1898. She retained connections to the school and, through a correspondence spanning several decades, to a beloved teacher, Mother Stephanie Mohun, OP.

Ms. McCormick, who received honorary degrees from 17 prestigious colleges and universities, including St. Mary of the Springs College and The Ohio State University, received her sole diploma from the Academy. She graduated with honors on Wednesday, June 22, 1898, delivering the Graduating Essay, “The Worship of Beauty.”

In a luminous career as a journalist, Ms. McCormick became the first woman journalist to receive the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 as the most distinguished foreign correspondent. She was noted “for her brilliant and accurate work as a correspondent specializing in international affairs.” In addition, she was the first woman to become a member of the New YorkTimes editorial board. In June, 1939, she was nominated by the National Business and Professional Women’s Club at the New York World’s Fair as one of the most outstanding women in America and selected as “The Woman of 1939.”

Ms. McCormick’s professional awards and accolades span two decades. Among other awards, she received the prestigious Laetare Award from the University of Notre Dame in 1944.

She interviewed world leaders such as Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin, and wrote her daily column, “Abroad,” for the New York Times. She was part of the press corps covering the Potsdam Conference. Aboard ship with President Harry Truman on the return trip, she was present when he announced to the press that the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.

She was married in 1910 to Dayton businessman, Francis J. McCormick. In 1928, she donated a copy of her only published book, The Hammer and Scythe, to the Dominican Sisters with the inscription: "To St. Mary's of the Springs, from one of its grateful children." That book and her private collection are housed in the rare book room of Ohio Dominican University. A lifelong Catholic, her strong religious convictions greatly influenced her views throughout her career.

Upon her death in 1954, Catholic World magazine noted that she “had a warm sympathy for suffering and a cold hatred for tyranny.”