San Antonio: The only convent in the United States where nuns pack and sell citrus fruit is sixty three years old this month.
Special observance at the Holy Name Academy in this Pasco County community, thirty five miles from Tampa, marks the humble beginning of the convent and tuition school for girls in 1888.
Holy Name Academy is operated by the Sister of St. Benedict, a monastic order established in 529 A.D. by St. Benedict. There are fifty nuns at the convent, teaching the one hundred students, working in the kitchens and gardens and offices, and helping pack the citrus fruit grown on the school’s fifty five acre grove.
Fame of the Holy Name Academy special gift pack citrus fruit has spread through the years so that now orders come in from forty states, Canada and England. Thousands of gift boxes, packed to the individual taste and order, are shipped ten months of the year, with the peak reached in December.
Additional thousands of boxes of citrus are sold on the tree to commercial packers and canners, and the Rev. Mother Caroline, O.S.B., who heads the academy, estimates that a half of the school’s income comes from citrus. The rest, of course, comes from tuition.
The guiding force behind all this is a little – about five feet tall – nun who has been at the convent for fifty years – and whose constant work and devotion have built the groves from a single tree to acres of Hamlin, Valencia, Navel, Parson Brown and Temple oranges, plus Marsh seedless grapefruit, satsumas, kumquats. The academy, by the way is a member of Citrus Mutual.
The citrus-growing nun is Sister Mary, who personally packs every gift box that leaves the school. In the last few weeks, with holiday orders pouring in, she’s been working fourteen hours a day.
Sister Mary gets help from three other sisters, all younger women, who work full-time with her in the grove and packing work, and from other nuns in the convent as they get time during the day from their other activities.
The sisters who work in the office, for instance, chip in during odd hours to help with the labeling, correspondence, compiling of orders, and so on. Others who may not have classes during certain hours will drop into the packing house to help with the washing, grading, polishing, and so on.
When the groves were first started the sisters worked in the fields, fertilizing, pruning, cultivating. When the commercial operation got to be a full-sixe business venture, however, men were hired to look after the actual grove work. But the nuns still insisted upon personally packing and crating the gift boxes.
The citrus shipment started out only in the form of gifts from the sisters to benefactors, but more and more calls came for the special packs, so a little more that then years ago, Sister Mary decided to turn the groves into a means of providing more money for the school.
Most of the fruit is sold now strictly on a commercial basis, but Sister Mary’s devoted attention to each shipment of a gift box is done still in the spirit of giving.
She doesn’t worry half as much about getting the $2.25 a bushel as she does about furnishing the kind of fruit the patron ordered, or if she knows them – the kinds they especially like.
All of this got started sixty three years ago this month when Mother Dolorosa Scanlan, O.S.B. of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, was asked to establish school for girls in San Antonio. When she and four other founding sisters arrived, there was not one orange tree on the land allotted to them.
Their groves, started with one tree four miles away from the Academy site, set aside for them by a friendly famer by the name of Rhode. The sisters walked each season to tend the tree and pick the oranges. Rhode then gave a few slips, which they planted. Other neighbors gave a tree here and there, and these too prospered, finally bearing fruit.
As the years passed benefactors began giving additional tracts of land. These were cleared, planted with purchased trees.
December 1951 Tampa Paper