Perched on a hill overlooking the Mississippi River, Notre Dame High School and its 260 students are part of the legacy of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, who first immigrated to St. Louis in 1858 to fulfill their mission to educate the poor and help the disadvantaged.
This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund.
To build their residential Mother House and school, the sisters purchased property once owned by Dred Scott’s enslavers, Peter and Henry Blow. They opened the school in 1895, sitting above train tracks that snake along the river and once carried lead ore mined in southern Missouri, where thousands of miners — many of them enslaved — toiled in toxic conditions…