150 Years Ago in Salt Lake City: The Christmas of Catholic Nuns and Slave Cabin Singers
By Michael P. O'Brien
It’s not easy to pick the most memorable and unique Christmas in Salt Lake City history as there have been many.
Of course, there was that first Dec. 25 in Utah for the Mormon pioneers. They worked on Christmas Day 1847 but still paused briefly for a simple feast.
During December 1871, the original Catholic church in Utah—the old St. Mary Magdalene on Second East Street between South Temple and First South—hosted Salt Lake City’s first Christmas Midnight Mass.
In 1945, The Salt Lake Tribune helped launch the tradition of downtown holiday decorating, and in the early 1970s, the old ZCMI store (now Macy’s) started decorating its windows with Christmas candy. In 1965, Temple Square’s Christmas light displays began.
In 1944, Willam Christensen choreographed “The Nutcracker” in California but premiered it in Utah 10 years later. The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square did not perform annual Christmas concerts until the year 2000.
And memorable for all the wrong reasons was Dec. 25, 1859, when just after noon, Salt Lakers had to dodge dozens of flying bullets from a Christmas Day gunfight that raged up and down Main Street.
Although all these holidays were unique, I think December 1875 stands out. It was the Christmas of Catholic nuns and slave cabin singers.
The Holy Cross Sisters had first arrived here from their convent in Notre Dame, Indiana six months earlier. Sister Raymond (Mary) Sullivan and Sister Augusta (Amanda) Anderson traveled to Salt Lake City via train and stagecoach at the invitation of Father Lawrence Scanlan, soon to be Utah’s bishop, and more followed.
Scanlan hoped the good Sisters would help his fledgling Catholic community build schools and meet other local human and spiritual needs. They did just that.
A few years earlier, Sister Augusta had started her Holy Cross work as a Civil War nurse. In the 1860s, she managed two Union army hospitals so well that General Ulysses S. Grant exclaimed, “What a wonderful woman she is! She can control the men better than I can.”
Local Utah bard Gerald (Gary) McDonough’s aunt was a Holy Cross Sister too, but a few years later in his poem “Porch Nuns,” Gary colorfully described the long black Holy Cross robes, also donned by pioneers like Sister Augusta.
Calling their veils “corrugated halos that circled their heads, like broad white walled tires…,” Gary explained that whenever they visited his family, intrigued Latter-day Saint neighbors would emerge to watch “the giant emperor penguins, milling about the McDonough’s front porch.”
One can only imagine how unique and unusual it was for the Salt Lake Saints to see those “giant emperor penguins” milling about downtown for the first time during the Christmas season of 1875.
That December, the women of St. Mary Magdalene church organized a grand fair to raise money for the new Holy Cross Hospital. A large crowd—including both Catholics and Latter-day Saints attended.
The Salt Lake Tribune called it the “greatest attraction of the season,” one with music, plays, shooting galleries, “richly furnished refreshment tables,” and a “magnificent display of skillfully and delicately wrought fancy articles” for sale.
During the same week the grand fair was open, a popular singing group called “the Tennesseans” was in town as part of a national tour.
Contemporary newspaper articles and advertisements described the Tennesseans as “slave cabin singers” who performed “old plantation melodies and camp meeting hymns” from the South. These college students who once were slaves earned rave reviews wherever they sang.
After watching them perform, The Salt Lake Tribune said the widespread praise for the Tennesseans was well-deserved. The Utah Evening Mail proclaimed them better than “any singers that have visited Salt Lake,” and The Deseret News called them the “most superb colored company in America.”
One evening just before Christmas, right after the Tennesseans had finished a concert at the old Salt Lake Theatre, they stopped by the grand fair for Holy Cross Hospital. To the crowd’s delight, they sang a couple songs.
And then they did something that made the Christmas of 1875 one of the most unique and memorable in Utah history. The former slaves serenaded the Holy Cross Sisters.
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the Tennesseans sang some of “their finest melodies” to honor “Mother Augusta for her services in checking the negro massacre at Fort Pillow, during the war…” The Utah Evening Mail called the impromptu concert “an expression of gratitude” to the Holy Cross Sisters whose “humane services in aiding to suppress the Fort Pillow massacre” and whose “uniform devotion to the relief of the soldiers” would never be forgotten.
Fort Pillow was one of the moral nadirs of the American Civil War. In April 1864, Confederates massacred hundreds of Black Union soldiers stationed at a fortress the rebels had conquered in Tennessee. Sister Augusta cared for the surviving Fort Pillow victims at the nearby hospital she supervised.
It was difficult work.
Sister Augusta’s journal describes the appalling conditions of that hospital when she first arrived: “Although we were tired and sick for want of sleep, there was no rest for us. We pinned up our habits, got brooms and buckets of water, and washed the blood-stained walls and scrubbed the floors….The hospital was full of sick and wounded, but after some days we succeeded in getting it comparatively clean.”
Notre Dame President Father William Corby—himself the chaplain of the Irish Brigade that famously fought at the Battle of Gettysburg—noted the full measure of Sister Augusta’s devotion: “The labors and self-sacrifices of the [Holy Cross] Sisters during the war need no praise here. Their praise is on the lips of every surviving soldier who experienced their kind and careful administrations.”
The grateful Tennesseans remembered, too, and thanked the Holy Cross Sisters with the gift of music. I cannot say for certain just what they sang 150 years ago in Salt Lake City during that most unusual Christmas of 1875.
But I like to think that as the stars and the moon bathed the Wasatch foothills with a soft white light, the lovely lyrics of one song in particular—an old spiritual also born on a Southern plantation—rose gently into the crisp winter air and echoed off the snow-covered Oquirrh slopes, perhaps for the very first time:
“Oh, when I was a seeker, I sought both night and day. I asked the Lord to help me, and he showed me the way. Go tell it on the mountain, Over the hills and everywhere, Go tell it on the mountain, That Jesus Christ is born!”
(The preceding article was published in The Salt Lake Tribune on Dec. 13, 2025.)
