It was endowed by the O'Briens, a local gentry family (Killina – also donated lands for presentation convent and school in Killina), and was intended to cater for upper middle class Catholics, as was the sister college at Clongowes Wood College where most of its pupils would graduate to.

water polo was played at the school, the first pitch being laid under Delaney's rectorship and the facilities developed by Karl Wisthoff (1845–1937), a German Jesuit, were highly regarded;[1] he also had the Grand Canal widened to allow rowing.

This may have been because of a shortage of priests, as the Jesuit House in Dromore, County Down closed the same year and Mungret College in Limerick had just been established.

St. Stanislaus College was sometimes titled Domus Probationis et Studiorum Tulliolana (The House of Formation and Studies at Tullamore) by the Jesuits.

The building and grounds remained closed for a while before being bought by a local builder and used as a nursing home and a 9-hole golf course.

Kevin A Laheen has written a detailed history of the college called the Jesuits in Tullabeg, either 3 or 4 volumes.

The chapel at Tullabeg with its seven Evie Hone windows was one of the glories of Irish religious art of the twentieth century.

Others who spent time in Tullabeg include Fergal McGrath, Edward Coyne (founder of the Catholic Workers College/ National College of Industrial Relations) and historian Francis Shaw.

The former confederate chaplain in the American civil war John Bannon ministered at Tullabeg in 1880, after he returned to Ireland and joined the Jesuits.

Donal O'Sullivan who was chairman of the Irish Arts Council was rector of the college in the 1940s, and commissioned works by Evie Hone.