by Sr. Regina Siegfried, ASC
Several bricks had been relocated from the attic to the auditorium to await a decision about their future. Although heavy and awkward for archival storage, the bricks are still built into our long history in Ruma. So I decided most of them needed to be preserved and stay home.
Other attic artifacts are also staying in the area. The museum in Red Bud will house a cream can, several items from St. Clement’s Hospital, and a still intact cardboard oatmeal box. Historic Prairie du Rocher has plans for a museum, so the organizers visited and left with many treasures for their collection, including two sister dolls, cotton combers, wooden shingles from the 1867 building, and an array of old hand tools. They really wanted Clementine’s spinning wheel, but that was moved to Wichita.
As plans to move the martyrs’ statue developed, I thought cementing the bricks in the concrete around the statue would be a good way to keep them at home. The Lager Monument Company embedded the bricks around the base of the statue in such a way that they are unobtrusive, not detracting from the statue but still visible in the concrete circle. The first brick (counterclockwise) is from the original 1867 building. Bricks 2-8 were probably made by the sisters and date from the 1890 addition. The construction of the 1925 building provided the last brick.
Our foremothers came to this country with a largely unarticulated sense of their history and mission, and they saved things either from frugal necessity or a sense of an item’s value. Now aware of the richness of our history, we treasure items that highlight that historic past.