A walk into history at Academy

Klaras Ihnken, center, tells visitors on a walking tour of the Providence Academy about the tender-but-tough character of Mother Joseph. Joseph, a nun and hospital builder, always put a chapel at the center of every building she designed. (Photos by Vivian Johnson/ for The Columbian)

Kathleen Saxton, right, explores the outside of the Providence Academy with a couple of friends Saturday. The place was built out of Hidden family bricks. Many outbuildings have come and gone from the seven-acre grounds, with others remaining but showing their age. (Vivian Johnson/ for The Columbian)

Kathleen Saxton, right, listens as Klaras Ihnken leads the way through the Providence Academy building. On Saturday, Saxton visited the place for the first time since the late 1940s, when her mother placed her there for a few months.

The front driveway at Providence Academy used to be heart-shaped, according to tour guide Mary Grgich.

Kathleen Saxton remembers "waking up at night and sitting there in my little bed in what seemed like this great big room. I remember being scared but not terrified."

The room was dark and full of sleeping children — mostly orphans, though 6-year-old Saxton was temporarily left by a mother seeking work — but there was a comforting light coming from the back, where the Sisters of Providence slept.

Sixty years later, Saxton returned for the first time to visit the Academy building in downtown Vancouver. She came along on a historic architectural walking tour sponsored by Clark County Historical Museum. A variety of downtown tours are given all summer, Thursdays at noon for one hour and alternate Saturdays at 10 a.m. for two hours; check cchmuseum.org for details.

Other tour topics include downtown neighborhoods like Hough, Arnada and Esther Short, as well as the work of celebrated local architects like Day Hilborn and Donald Stewart.

Saturday's Providence Academy tour focused on the last surviving building, out of more than 30, attributed to the keen brains and dynamic leadership of Mother Joseph — architect, hospital builder, caretaker of the poor, pioneer nun and leader of the missionary Sisters of Providence, who came west in 1856.

Their charge was to care for the sick, educate the children and bring Christianity to all in the wild Washington Territory. The woman born Esther Pariseau in Quebec took the identity Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart. She and her sisters opened a boarding school and then a hospital. And Mother Joseph set about building the red-brick edifice that still stands out as downtown Vancouver's most visible link to its pioneer past.

When it opened in 1873, it was the largest brick building north of San Francisco — built of Hidden bricks, manufactured by the longstanding Vancouver foundry family.

"She loved brick," said Mother Joseph expert Klaras Ihnken, who sang the praises and underscored the boldness of the building's designer. Mother Joseph also loved black walnut — "a very, very hard wood to work," Ihnken said.

It seems fitting. By all accounts, Mother Joseph was one tough mother. She traveled thousands of miles around the West, visiting construction sites where her designs were being made real, and she was an uncompromising taskmaster.

There's a famous sculpture (now in Washington, D.C.) of Mother Joseph on her knees praying, but Ihnken quipped: "I don't think the woman ever had time to pray on her knees. She was too busy telling people how high to jump."

The Academy building, according to tour guide Mary Grgich, is an example of French Colonial design with symmetrical Georgian features — masonry and arches, floor-to-ceiling windows, prominent doorways and graceful wooden "galleries" on the ends of all three floors. And here's an interesting design tidbit about those tall, narrow windows: second-floor windows are eight inches shorter than first-floor windows, and third-floor windows are equally shorter than second. Losing eight inches per floor creates an illusion of greater height when viewed from below.

Didn't think Mother Joseph would mess with your mind like that? It was a common architectural practice of the day, Grgich said.

The whole building was designed in the shape of a cross, but additions and remodels have extended it farther than Mother Joseph intended. (She might not have been too pleased about that.) It served as a boarding school and orphanage and hospital; there were gardens and orchards and many auxiliary buildings. To finance all this, the nuns went begging — and promising miners and other laborers in the Pacific Northwest that in return for their donations, they'd have the assurance of a place to be cared for if they were sick or injured.

That was the pioneer origin of today's Providence Health and Services, the hospital chain that's still partially under the purview of the Sisters of Providence.

But by 1969, the 56,000-square-foot building appeared destined for the wrecking ball, and it was saved by Vancouver's Hidden family — whose foundry fired its bricks a century earlier. According to Ihnken, Washington is rich with brick institutional buildings partially because of Mother Joseph's projects and stylistic influence.

The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and various buyers have sniffed at the seven-acre property — including the city of Vancouver for a potential City Hall — but zoning regulations and the extensive cost of a modern remodel have proved prohibitive. Today the building is carved into rental space — offices, catering and a towering wedding chapel that was placed at the heart of the building by its devout designer.

Returnee Kathleen Saxton, who recently retired as a pre-sentencing investigator for Clark County, marvelled at what was familiar and what was different in the rooms and hallways, which are pretty much unchanged — other than fresh paint — since the 1940s, according to former student Ihnken.

Overall, Saxtron said, her memories of the place aren't so unpleasant: kids making minor mischief, sliding down bannisters and leaping from monkey bars, and earning punishments like shelling peas with the Sisters — which she secretly found plenty of fun.

"It's a very interesting feeling," she said, 60 years later.

Scott Hewitt: 360-735-4525 or scott.hewitt@columbian.com.