Last Saturday, 114 young women dressed in formal white gowns, each carrying red roses, became the 150th graduating class of historic Mount de Sales Academy in Catonsville.
And in accordance with tradition, each graduate entered the stage and curtsied to the seated audience, dignitaries and assembled guests.
"In the current, less formal age, these may well be the first and last curtsies executed by a girl," according to An Academy of Every Virtue: A History of Mount de Sales Academy, Catonsville 1852-2002, a sesquicentennial history written by Richard C. and Susan M. Randt and published this year.
The book tells of a young woman who presented roses to Britain's Queen Elizabeth, the mother of the present queen, during her visit to Washington with King George VI in 1939. After presenting roses to the queen, the woman was asked, "'Where did you learn to make the bow of the Court of St. James's?' She replied, 'At the Mount de Sales commencement.' She had had much practice as she was a former student," the Randts write.
Mount de Sales, which is celebrating its 150th birthday this year, was established by the Visitation Sisters, a cloistered order, with ground being broken for its building in 1851. Christened Mount de Sales by Baltimore's Archbishop Samuel Eccleston, the new school accepted its first 21 students in 1852.
Mount de Sales is Baltimore County's oldest Catholic house of worship, the oldest girls school and the first Catholic school. It is also the oldest educational facility still in use in the Baltimore area.
The impressive brick Greek Revival structure has a grandeur about it that puts one in mind of the 19th century hotels found in Cape May, N.J., or Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
At the time of its construction, when the taste for classical revival architecture was waning, Mount de Sales "aided in bolstering and prolonging Baltimore's conservative aesthetics," said the Randts.
"Its front steps were carved from Woodstock granite. When ascending the steps into the building, one notices the Roman numerals carved into them at the quarry so that they could be placed in proper sequence. There was a wrought-iron porch on the front, at the chapel level, running from the chapel the entire length of the academic wing. That front porch probably was taken down when the Monastery wing was added in 1883. Of course, the magnificent decorative iron-railed porches on the back remain," the Randts write.
The building, with its old monastery garden and whimsical gatehouse, sits on commanding heights from which the outline of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the waters of the Patapsco River can be easily viewed on a clear day.
For many years, it is said, the building was included on nautical charts to help mariners steer their ships into Baltimore Harbor.
"From its inception, Mount de Sales was a convent school of a largely southern order whose first two Mothers Superior were from old southern families," the authors write.
Its many distinguished alumnae included the daughters of A.S. Abell, founder and publisher of The Sun, and of Gen. Felix Agnus, proprietor of the old Baltimore American. "It seems only fitting that the girls of these families should receive their education at an institution whose namesake, St. Francis de Sales, was designated by the Church as the patron saint of journalism," the authors say.
Mary Pinkney Hardy, the daughter of a prosperous Virginia cotton broker who moved to Baltimore during the Civil War, graduated from the school in 1871. She later became the mother of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
In MacArthur's Reminiscences, he recalls that his mother was awarded the school's highest honor, "a crown and a gold medal for uniform excellence of conduct."
Conduct was an ever-present fact of daily life.
In their history of Mount de Sales, the authors have reproduced a page from Rules for Class, which dates to the 1870s and gives the reader a glimpse of when classroom decorum was firmly and perhaps not so gently enforced:
"The young ladies are to enter the room with a curtsey and not take their seats until told to do so. They are to kneel in a respectful posture during the prayer. During recitations, nothing must be kept in the hands. If a young lady does not recite her lessons in an audible voice, it will be considered as a failure and subject to said study room. Strict silence is to be observed in class and when necessary to speak, permission must be asked."
In 1979, due to the dwindling numbers and age of the Visitation nuns, it appeared that both their monastery and the school would have to close.
However, alumnae, parents and friends of the school rallied to save it. In 1985, a new order, the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, of Nashville, arrived on campus to continue the school's tradition of Catholic education.
The Rev. Michael J. Roach, the pastor of St. Bartholomew Roman Catholic Church in Manchester and current president of the board of trustees of Mount de Sales, seemed to sum up the school's history in a 1980 address to the graduating class that year.
"There have been a dozen major crises over a century and a quarter that seemed to spell doom for this institution - anti-Catholic bigotry, the fratricidal Civil War, lack of enrollment, financial reverses, fire code violations, hierarchical antipathy or at least apathy - but in God's Providence, Mount de Sales overcame these phenomenal odds and continued and she may well continue for another 128 years."