The History of Bourbonnais St. Viator Academy Bourbonnais (population 15,256) is located in northeastern Illinois in central Kankakee County, just north of Kankakee. The town was home to the Pottawatomi Indians, who were befriended by explorer Robert Cavalier deLaSalle during an expedition in 1679, but it wasn’t until 1830 when fur trader Francois Bourbonnais established Bourbonnais Grove. Slowly but surely, more French Canadians made their way to the area and settled. The community was incorporated in 1875. Bourbonnais is approximately 15 miles west of the Indiana state border. The following roadways now lead to and from this busy metropolis: Interstate Highway 57, U.S. Route 45, Illinois Routes 17, 50, and 102. The Kankakee River flows to the west and south of town. The Illinois Central Gulf Railroad also has tracks which pass through town. St. Viator Academy was established in 1865 when the Clerics of St. Viator (CSV) sent three men to open a school for boys. Rev. Peter Beaudoin along with two lay brothers, Augustin Martel and Jean Baptiste Bernard came from Canada on orders from the Canadian Province of the CSV to do so after a visit from Rev. James Cote, pastor of Maternity Catholic Church in Bourbonnais, to convince the CSV to begin a school to be companion to an all-girls’ school that was established in the community five years earlier. The school started slow, eventually buying the building they were using, then added a three-story addition in 1868. St. Viator’s offered education from grade school thru college as the first collegiate graduates received their degrees in 1874. Additional buildings for use as dormitories were built later. By 1890, the school was offering five different courses of study: preparatory, commercial, classical, “letters,” “scientific,” and seminary. In addition, the school also had a military department with six companies of cadets.
St. Viator survived a major fire in February 1906, which destroyed nearly every building except the gymnasium and an unfinished alumni hall. The school would rebuild, and flourish. The gym did not escape flame damage as it would be destroyed in 1926, but a newer gym along with another building were built in their place shortly thereafter. That gym would be the site of the Illinois Catholic High School Association’s state basketball tournament in 1929-30-31 as teams from downstate Illinois came together to decide who would represent them at the National Catholic Basketball Tournament in Chicago. The school closed in 1931 due to other parish and private schools in the area opening, along with increased enrollment at the college, and inability to keep the high school classes in a separate building from the college courses. An additional factor, with the onset of the depression, was financing became extremely difficult. The college itself closed in 1938, and the campus was bought by Olivet Nazarene University in 1939 as it moved in the following summer. Olivet Nazarene University sold their original property at Olivet, in Eastern Illinois south of Danville, to the Catholic Church, with the campus administered by the LaSallette Fathers. Today a private academy administered by the Society of St. Pius X is found at the original Olivet campus. Olivet Nazarene remains at the Bourbannais location, as do several of the buildings that were used at St. Viator’s, which include an administration building, fieldhouse/gymnasium, mens’ residence hall, and dining hall (now a business hall). Some of the St. Viator’s buildings today are used by the local Catholic parish. Some of the notable graduates from St. Viator’s College were Archbishop Fulton Sheen (an El Paso native), who later went on to fame after his 1918 graduation as the host of programs such as “The Catholic Hour” and “Life is Worth Living” on radio and television. (Archbishop Sheen attended High School at Peoria Spalding, found elsewhere on this site) You can read more about Sheen thru this link: http://www.elpaso.net/~bank/elpasohistory/sheen/. Also graduating from St. Viator were Bishop Bernard J. Sheil, founder of the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) and administrator at Lewis Holy Name Institute in Lockport, along with former Chicago White Sox first baseman Dick (Bud) Clancy, an Odell native who would hit .281 in nine seasons of major league play with the Chisox, Brooklyn Dodgers, and Philadelphia Phillies. |
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