Sisters of Saint Francis of Rochester, Minnesota

The Sisters of Saint Francis of Rochester, Minnesota is a Roman Catholic religious congregation for women.

However, in 1877, a dispute over finances regarding the new academy led Chicago Bishop Thomas Foley to direct the sisters to separate from the Joliet Community.

[2] Sister-nurses tended to the sick, cooked the patients’ meals, did the laundry, stoked the furnace and even used the hair of convent horses to make surgical sutures.

[3] The Sisters also continued their work in education, staffing parochial schools in Minnesota and beyond, while also establishing academies in Owatonna and Rochester.

Their work included post-secondary education, and in 1894, they founded what would become the College of Saint Teresa in Winona, Minnesota.