RUMFORD — Sister Jacqueline Dickey, now retired and in her 70s, says that she and the other nuns in the convent on Franklin Street lived in very tight quarters.

Fifteen nuns resided there when she moved into the convent around 1957.

“The nine youngest ones of us were in three rooms with three beds each, just separated by a curtain between each bed,” she said. “We had our bed and a nightstand and that was it. And in the front of the room there was a small closet.” 

The nuns, from Quebec, Canada, were belonged to the Order of St. Chretienne. Sister Jackie completed her training in Quebec and was happy to come to Rumford, as she had always wanted to live here, a state she described as “a lot more ‘countryish’ than (her native state) Rhode Island.”

St. John’s Parish (now the Parish of the Holy Savior) was her first assignment as a sister.

“I know I registered to vote for the first time in Rumford and you had to be 21 at the time,” she said.

The nuns’ daily schedule was to get up around five o’clock in the morning, recite their prayers and have Mass in the convent. Following breakfast, they walked next door to teach at St. John’s School.

Sister Jackie taught third grade at the K-8 elementary school. The first year, she had 31 students because there were two third-grade classrooms, but the following year, she had around 50 students in her class.

“I taught reading, writing and arithmetic, some history and geography, music and maybe art, although I was never good at art,” Sister Dickey said. “We spent a lot of time on reading and arithmetic and writing because they were the basics. 

The sister who taught kindergarten had 70 students, she said.

Sister Dickey said she enjoyed her students very much and didn’t mind the winters, even though Rumford had snow from October to May.

“There were big mounds of it and children went out to recess even when it was zero degrees,” she said.

The nuns would go outside to supervise the children, walking up and down in the schoolyard to keep warm.

“I enjoyed it in those days; I was young and I liked the winter,” she said. “Not so much now.

“Basically, we were in school all day except for lunchtime, and we had a small dining room that was very crowded; we just barely fit in,” she said. “I was the youngest one and I was sitting at the end of the table, up against the wall. I had to get up if somebody wanted to go by. It was tight.”

Along with teaching, each nun was responsible for cleaning her classroom and another space in the school, either a hallway, stairway or another room. They didn’t have janitors, she said.

During the years 1957 to 1960, the nuns living at the convent were not allowed to go home to visit their families.

“We only went home if our parents died,” Sister Dickey said.

The nuns began going home for visits around 1962 or 1963.

“At first, we were allowed to go home three days and later on it became like two weeks. It was hard, but we knew when we entered (the convent) that that was what it was going to be like.”

Her parents came from Rhode Island to visit her on Christmas and Easter, and she was able to visit them when she finished her studies in Boston during the summer months.

After 1968, a lot of major changes occurred in the religious lives of the nuns.

“That’s when we started to not have to wear the old habits anymore, which were very warm in the summertime because they were black and they were very hot,” she said.

When the nuns weren’t teaching, they sometimes went out on excursions, especially in the summertime. Sometimes they’d go out for the day, visiting places such as New Hampshire, or they would go for long walks and hikes.

“I climbed the tower of Mt. Zircon in my habit,” she said.

At the convent, the nuns enjoyed sitting outside on the porch on summer evenings.

“We had a lovely porch on the side and we would head out there a lot, especially in the evenings in the summertime,” she said. ‘We enjoyed that a lot.”

Otherwise, the nuns would walk to town to go shopping, always in pairs, “because that was the rule,” she says. “It was much stricter than it is today. But when we entered to become nuns we knew that.”

Sister Dickey spent three years living and teaching in Rumford and then she went to Mexico for another assignment that lasted seven years. In 1991, the sisters of St. Chretienne left Rumford, due to dwindling enrollment at St. John’s and fewer sisters available to teach.

Area resident Sister Bernadette Gautreau states that “students of St. John’s Parish received a high-quality education and a solid foundation to their Catholic faith because of the devotion and dedication” of the sisters of St. Chretienne.

Sister Dickey now lives in Rhode Island. She said that many of the sisters who lived at the convent either have died or are living in a retirement facility in Massachusetts.

The convent was recently demolished after being vacant for 10 to 15 years, according to Holy Savior’s church Choir Director Mark Belanger, who is also a builder builder by trade and on the church’s building committee.

“We tried to sell it and it was on the market for like, seven or eight years and there was no market for it, so we, the diocese, decided on the advice of the building committee to tear it down.”

The rectory near the church was also torn down at that time.

The extra space left by the demolished building will probably end up being part of Holy Savior School’s playground and extra parking on the weekends for the church, Belanger said.

mhutchinson@sunmediagroup.net

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