Blessed Martin in the Paper Trail: What the Annual Reports Reveal

Some histories announce themselves loudly.

Others survive in forms.

Blessed Martin School has already received a thoughtful and important historical treatment through Archiving Wheeling’s excellent report by Board Member, Sean Duffy, on Wheeling’s short-lived segregated Catholic school. That work gives readers the essential arc: why the school existed, who helped build it, how it fit into Catholic education, and why it mattered to generations of Black students and families.

This post begins a different kind of series.

Rather than retell that whole story, for this installment, we are looking closely at the annual reports Blessed Martin submitted to the Diocese of Wheeling. These are not polished commemorative histories. They are working documents: names, grades, totals, addresses, teachers, subjects, phone numbers, corrections, and institutional labels.

They also preserve names. And names matter, because institutions do not teach children.

People do.

And that is exactly why they matter.

The reports show Blessed Martin not only as a memory, but as an operating school. They show its growth, its structure, its ambitions, its constraints, and its place inside the larger machinery of segregated education in Wheeling.

The Name Before the Name

One of the most striking findings appears at the very beginning.

The 1942 report does not yet present the school with the familiar name “Blessed Martin.” It identifies it plainly as the “Catholic Colored School” in Wheeling, West Virginia.

That wording is jarring now, but it is historically important. It tells us how the institution was being recorded at the time: not simply as a Catholic school that happened to serve Black children, but as a school defined by segregation from its first official paperwork.

By the next annual report, dated September 15, 1943, the school is listed as “Blessed Martin School.” That gives us a documented window for the naming shift: sometime between September 1942 and September 1943. We do not yet have the exact day the name changed, but the paper trail makes the transition clear.

The “why” is just as meaningful. Blessed Martin de Porres was a mixed-race Catholic figure from Peru who endured racial prejudice and became associated with humility, service, healing, and racial harmony. In the 1940s, he was still known as “Blessed” Martin because he would not be canonized as Saint Martin de Porres until 1962.

For a segregated Catholic school in Wheeling, that namesake was not accidental. It gave the school a spiritual identity rooted in service and racial dignity, even while the school itself existed inside a segregated system.

That makes the naming shift powerful. “Catholic Colored School” was the administrative label. It described how segregation categorized the children. “Blessed Martin” was the devotional name. It described how the Church chose to frame the school’s mission and moral identity.

Both names belong in the story.

Together, they reveal the contradiction at the heart of Blessed Martin: a school created because Black children were excluded, yet named for a holy figure whose life pointed toward human dignity across racial lines.

From Two Teachers to a Full School

The reports make clear that Blessed Martin did not remain a tiny elementary experiment for long.

In 1942, the school had 37 students.

By 1943, it had 47.

By 1944, it had grown to 76 students, and the paperwork shows something especially important: Blessed Martin had added ninth grade students. That means the school was already beginning to stretch beyond elementary education.

By 1945, the report listed 85 students, including ninth and tenth graders.

By 1946, the report identified Blessed Martin as “Blessed Martin High School” and showed students in grades nine, ten, and eleven.

Then, in the 1947-1948 annual report, the full arc appears: students are recorded from first grade through twelfth grade. That report shows 100 students total, including seven twelfth graders.

That number matters because Blessed Martin’s first graduating high school class was also seven students. The annual report turns the graduation story into a paper trail. It shows the school reaching the finish line of a full twelve-grade program in real time.

What began as a segregated Catholic elementary school had become a full academic institution.

A School With an Address, a Phone, and a Daily Rhythm

The reports repeatedly locate Blessed Martin at 37 Thirteenth Street in Wheeling. By chance, I lived at 52 Thirteenth Street as a child decades later unknowing of the rich history that once stood across the street from where I lived and played. One annual report includes the handwritten notation “13th + Jacob St.”

That detail gives the school a physical presence.

Blessed Martin was not an abstract “colored Catholic school” floating somewhere in Wheeling’s history. It stood in a real neighborhood, at a real intersection, with a school phone number, a convent phone number, school hours, grades, teachers, and students moving through the building day after day.

One report lists the school day as 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

That simple line is powerful.

It reminds us that Blessed Martin was not only a debate about Catholic segregation, not only a footnote in the Brown v. Board era, and not only a reunion memory. It was a daily routine. Children arrived in the morning. Teachers took attendance. Lessons began. Bells rang. Students learned spelling, religion, math, typing, biology, French, Latin, home economics, history, and English.

Segregation created the institution.

But inside that institution, children still lived full school days.

The Curriculum Was Serious

One of the strongest findings from the reports is how academically ambitious Blessed Martin became.

The high school reports list subjects that included religion, typing, shorthand, algebra, biology, chemistry, French, Latin, social studies, civics, history, English, commercial subjects, home economics, and mathematics.

That list matters because segregated schools are often remembered only through the lens of deprivation. And deprivation was real. Segregation was unjust by definition. It separated children by race and denied equal access to institutions that should have belonged to all.

But the curriculum shows that Blessed Martin’s teachers were also trying to build something serious within those limits.

Students were not simply being housed. They were being educated.

They were learning academic subjects, commercial skills, sciences, languages, and practical arts. The school was preparing students for high school completion, work, college opportunities, and civic life.

That is one of the central tensions of Blessed Martin’s history. The school existed because of segregation, but it also became a place where Black children received disciplined, structured, ambitious instruction.

Both truths have to be held together.

The Faculty Story Has Names

The annual reports also open the door to a deeper and more human look at the faculty and administrators who carried Blessed Martin from a tiny segregated Catholic school into a full elementary and high school program.

The earliest report lists Sister Anne Patricia as principal, with Rev. Edmund Yahn connected to the school as parish priest. Those two names appear again and again in the Blessed Martin story. Sister Anne Patricia was not simply filling out forms. She was the steady administrative and educational presence behind the school’s early years. Rev. Yahn, later Monsignor Edmund J. Yahn, appears throughout the records as the priestly figure attached to the school’s life and mission.

The first year’s report listed only two religious teachers. But as Blessed Martin grew, the faculty expanded with it. Across the annual reports, we see names such as Sister M. Teresa, Sister Sarita, Sister Angelina, Sister Grace Magdalene, Sister Philip Marie, Sister Celeste, Sister Demetria, Sister Claudia, Sister Agnes Regina, Sister Rose Immaculate, Sister M. Barbara, Sister de Lellis, Sister M. Louise, Sister M. Eleanor, Sister Sheila Marie, Sister Irma, Sister Placide, Sister Gabriella, Sister Brendan, and Sister Bertha.

The reports also show lay and postulant teachers entering the school’s story, including names such as Miss Rosemary, Maureen Feeney, Patricia Terneus, Barbara Blazek, Miss Coles, Miss Spainhour, Miss Lucy Cooper, Miss Louise DiMauri, Miss Mary Byron, and Sister Camillus.

These names help us see Blessed Martin as more than a building or a diocesan project. It was a working school staffed by real people, each bringing lessons, discipline, patience, expectations, and personality into the lives of Black children in Wheeling.

Some teachers carried extraordinary combinations of responsibility. The reports show one teacher responsible for early grade classrooms while others taught specialized high school subjects such as religion, English, French, Latin, algebra, biology, chemistry, commercial subjects, typing, shorthand, home economics, history, civics, and social studies.

That matters.

Segregated schools were often forced to do more with less. Blessed Martin was no exception. But the names in these reports show that the school’s survival was not accidental. It depended on people who taught across grades, across subjects, and across the emotional weight of segregation itself.

The administrative names are important too. The reports identify Motherhouse leadership and community supervisors, including Mother Agnes Regina, Sister M. Magdalen, and Sister M. Evangelista. Their presence in the records reminds us that Blessed Martin was not only a neighborhood school. It was part of the larger Catholic educational structure of the Diocese of Wheeling and the Sisters of St. Joseph.

By including these names, we restore some of the human texture of the story. Blessed Martin was not merely opened, operated, and closed. It was led, taught, supervised, prayed over, maintained, remembered, and loved by people whose names deserve to remain attached to the history they helped make.

Girls, Boys, and Growth

The reports carefully divide enrollment by boys and girls.

That may seem ordinary, but it gives us a clearer picture of who Blessed Martin served. The first year’s 37 students included 16 boys and 21 girls. By 1954, the elementary report listed 95 students: 42 boys and 53 girls. The secondary report for that same year listed 26 high school students: 15 boys and 11 girls.

The gender numbers move year to year, but one thing is clear: Blessed Martin served both Black boys and Black girls across elementary and secondary grades.

That matters because Black educational history is often told through institutions, buildings, and legal decisions. These reports pull us back to the students themselves. Each number was a child. Each grade column represented a classroom. Each total was a community.

Beside Lincoln: Two Segregated Paths to Graduation

Yes, I still have the Lincoln graduate spreadsheet. Using the overlapping high-school years and assuming Blessed Martin “seniors” graduated, here is the comparison.

Overlap Years: 1948-1955

Year	Lincoln Boys	Lincoln Girls	Lincoln Total	Blessed Martin Boys	Blessed Martin Girls	Blessed Martin Total	Combined Total	Blessed Martin Share
1948	5	13	18	5	2	7	25	28.0%
1949	11	8	19	3	4	7	26	26.9%
1950	8	10	18	3	0	3	21	14.3%
1951	12	10	22	3	5	8	30	26.7%
1952	8	12	20	3	3	6	26	23.1%
1953	10	12	22	8	5	13	35	37.1%
1954	13	11	24	1	5	6	30	20.0%
1955	9	11	20	4	0	4	24	16.7%
Total	76	87	163	30	24	54	217	24.9%

Note: For Blessed Martin, this uses senior enrollment as a graduation proxy. For Lincoln, enrolled students not only in Ohio County, but also from Hancock, Brooke, Ohio, and Marshall. Whereas Blessed Martin was bound by Dioceses terriorial boundaries and thus its numbers are exclusively children living in Wheeling. We will tackle the Lincoln geogrpahy fluidity in future blog posts as its a critical part of its history. This table will become critical about enrollment numbers of Wheeling's black youth.

For the years where Lincoln High School and Blessed Martin School overlapped as segregated Black high-school pathways in Wheeling, the numbers tell a quiet but powerful story.

Lincoln remained the central avenue. It was the free, public, tax-supported segregated school, the direct institutional descendant of Wheeling’s Colored School system. Between 1948 and 1955, Lincoln graduated 163 students: 76 boys and 87 girls. In that same period, Blessed Martin, the private-parochial Catholic school, reported 54 seniors: 30 boys and 24 girls, assuming those seniors completed graduation.

That means Blessed Martin may have represented roughly one out of every four Black high-school graduates in Wheeling during the overlapping years.

That is not a footnote. It changes the map.

Lincoln was the great public pillar. Blessed Martin was smaller, Catholic, tuition-bearing, and shaped by a different religious and educational tradition. But for families who chose it, or who found opportunity there, Blessed Martin offered another path through the same segregated city. Its presence tells us that Black education in Wheeling was not a single-track story.

It was layered: public and parochial, civic and religious, practical and aspirational.

The year 1953 jumps off the page. Lincoln graduated 22 students, while Blessed Martin reported 13 seniors, meaning Blessed Martin may have accounted for more than a third of the combined total that year.

For a school so often remembered as brief, small, and tucked into the margins, that is a serious footprint.

By 1955, the picture narrows. Lincoln graduated 20 students; Blessed Martin reported only 4 seniors. Within a year, Wheeling’s segregated educational world would be transformed by desegregation and the closing of Lincoln for all grades. Seen in that light, these numbers are more than enrollment data.

They are the final ledger of two institutions carrying Black students through the last years of legally segregated schooling in Wheeling.

For the Foundation, this comparison matters because it helps us resist flattening the story.

Lincoln was indispensable. Blessed Martin was meaningful.

Together, they show Black families navigating limited choices with seriousness, faith, ambition, and sacrifice.

The Reports Show Growth, But Also Strain

By the early 1950s, Blessed Martin had become a substantial institution.

The 1951-1952 annual report shows more than 100 students across grade school and high school. The 1953 reports show very strong elementary enrollment and a functioning high school. The 1954 reports, filed shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, still show Blessed Martin operating with students in grades one through twelve.

That is important.

Brown did not instantly dissolve segregated education in Wheeling. Nor did it immediately answer what would happen to Black Catholic students, Black public school students, or the teachers and families attached to segregated institutions.

The annual reports preserve that uncertain moment.

In September 1954, the school was still reporting students, teachers, grades, and subjects. The machinery of the school was still running. But history was moving around it.

Within a year, Blessed Martin would close.

What the Forms Do Not Say

The annual reports are valuable, but they are also limited.

They tell us how many students attended. They tell us who taught. They tell us what subjects were offered. They tell us where the school was located and how it reported itself to the Diocese.

But they do not tell us how it felt.

They do not tell us what it meant for a Black Catholic family to choose Blessed Martin. They do not tell us how students understood attending a segregated Catholic school in a city that already had Lincoln School, Wheeling’s segregated public school. They do not tell us what students thought when Blessed Martin closed and they entered previously white Catholic schools.

They do not tell us whether a child felt protected, excluded, proud, limited, loved, or all of those things at once.

That is why the Foundation’s work matters.

Documents give us the structure. Memory gives us the soul. Research must make room for both.

When the Archives Turn Personal

For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, this research is not abstract. It is local, familial, and deeply personal.

While reviewing records preserved by the Diocesan Archives, Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, I was able to confirm two facts that brought the Blessed Martin story directly into my own family history.

My father’s mother, Ruth Marie Johnson, enrolled at Blessed Martin in 1942 as a third grader.

That appears to place her there in the school’s first year of operation. When the doors opened.

Before Blessed Martin, she attended Lincoln School for first and second grade. She would go on to attend Blessed Martin through ninth grade.

Then, at the other end of the school’s brief life, my father’s older sister, Henia Druscilla Johnson, Ruth’s first born, attended Blessed Martin in 1955 as a first grader.

That year sadly marked the school’s final year.

We have confirmed that Henia would transition in 1956 as a second graded to the newly integrated Cathedral Grade School. Thus, making Henia a color-line breaker as 7 year old.

That discovery creates a powerful family bookend. My grandmother was there when Blessed Martin opened. Her daughter, my aunt, was there when it closed and a color-line breaker.

This is what research can do. It begins with a school report, a name, a grade, a date. Then suddenly the larger story of segregated Catholic education in Wheeling is no longer only a public history.

It is family history. It is the story of where our grandparents learned, where our aunts and uncles sat in classrooms, and how institutions shaped the lives of people we knew and loved, even when the details had faded from living memory.

It is also a reminder of why archives matter. Without these records, Blessed Martin might remain only a short chapter in Wheeling’s educational history. With them, we can recover the names, the years, the students, and the connections that make the history breathe again.

Why Blessed Martin Belongs in Our Larger Story

The Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation has spent significant time researching Wheeling’s Black educational history: the Colored School established by the Wheeling Board of Education in 1866, John W. West and the Freedmen’s Bureau reports, Lincoln School, desegregation, Black teachers, Black students, and the complicated ways public education shaped African American life in the city.

Blessed Martin belongs in that larger arc.

It reminds us that segregated education in Wheeling was not only a public school story. It was also a Catholic story. A neighborhood story. A family story. A story of faith, race, ambition, exclusion, and resilience.

It also complicates the map.

Lincoln School was the central institution in Wheeling’s Black public educational history.

Blessed Martin was something different: a segregated Catholic school created inside a religious system that was itself wrestling with race, mission, and belonging.

That difference is precisely why it deserves careful attention.

The First Lesson From the Reports

If there is one lesson from these annual reports, it is this:

Blessed Martin was short-lived, but it was not small.

It existed for only a brief period, but in that time it grew from 37 students into a full school serving elementary and high school grades. It educated children through a serious curriculum. It employed religious and lay teachers. It produced graduates. It stood at 13th and Jacob as a daily part of Black Wheeling’s educational landscape.

And then, like many segregated institutions after Brown, it disappeared into a complicated afterlife: remembered deeply by those who knew it, but often overlooked in the broader story of Wheeling.

This series will not attempt to replace the excellent work already done on Blessed Martin.

Instead, it will follow the paper trail, the student trail, the Catholic trail, and the Wheeling trail. The annual reports give us the first step.

They show us Blessed Martin not as legend, but as a working school.

A segregated school.

A Catholic school.

A Black Wheeling school.

A place where children climbed through the rocks of their time and still found a classroom waiting on the other side.

-T

Sources and Notes

• This post draws from Blessed Martin annual school reports and related student records preserved by the Diocesan Archives, Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston. The Diocese has been tremendously helpful and generous in making these materials available for historical research.

• Additional background: Seán Duffy, “Blessed Martin ~ Patron Saint of Racial Harmony,” Archiving Wheeling.