The
O'Reilly House Museum website provides the following information about the use of this historic house as the first convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Augustine:
The Father Miguel O’Reilly House has been a part of the lives of the Sisters of St. Joseph since the first eight Sisters arrived from the Motherhouse in Le Puy, France, amid the late summer heat of September 1866. The Sisters had volunteered to come to St. Augustine in answer to the call of Augustin Verot, then Bishop of Savannah, who had traveled back to his hometown of Le Puy the previous year. Verot wanted the Sisters to come to Florida to teach the children of the recently freed African-American slaves. The O’Reilly House, which by the time of their arrival had been held in trust for 54 years, became their first convent and first school.
Sixty-three years earlier, Father O’Reilly, then pastor of the St. Augustine parish, had the foresight to prepare a detailed will in which he left his residence, which had served as the parish rectory, for the benefit of an order of nuns “for education according to the plan of St. Francis de Sales.” (The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, though primarily based on the constitutions of the Society of Jesus, were influenced by the works of St. Francis de Sales.) The banner artwork on the page, “About the House,” is a detail of Father O’Reilly’s will in Spanish. The description speaks of “two stone houses with their orange groves.”
Upon Father O’Reilly’s death in 1812 the house was held in trust, first by his brother James, and then by the wardens of the parish. Ten years after the Sisters arrived in St. Augustine, Bishop Verot, who by this time had become the first bishop of St. Augustine in 1870, transferred the property cited in Father O’Reilly’s will to the Sisters of St. Joseph. Today they still hold the title.
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