Person:Eliza Starr (3)

ELIZA ALLEN STARR (1824 - 1901)

Many progeny of the early settlers of New England have found their way into the Catholic Church over the course of the years. It is remarkable that we now know as Catholics numerous descendants of early Puritan and Pilgrims who fulminated wildly against anything that smacked of Rome, and who refused Papists even entry into New England.

One such is Eliza Allen Starr, author and lecturer on art, whose family on both sides traced descent from early English immigrants to the Bay Colony and boasted of long residence at historic Deerfield, MA. On her father's side she was a direct descendant of Dr. Comfort Starr, who migrated from Ashford, County Kent, England and settled at Cambridge, MA in 1633. On her mother's side she was descended from the "Allans of the Bars" who came from Chelmsford, Essex, England.

She inherited the love of literature from her parents, and when thirteen years of age went to Boston, where she finished her studies in 1845. In Boston she opened a studio, but, the climate proving unfavorable to her health, she moved to Brooklyn, thence to Philadelphia. She finally accepted a position as teacher in the family of a wealthy planter at Natchez, Mississippi. In 1853 she returned to Brooklyn as teacher of drawing in a boarding school. In 1848 she returned to Philadelphia. It was during this visit to her family she met the Rt. Rev. Francis Patrick Kenrick, who later became Archbishop of Baltimore. It was from this saintly and learned churchman that the germs of faith already in her heart received their first activities.

After an incessant struggle of nine years she was received into the Catholic Church at Boston by Bishop Fitzpatrick on 23 December, 1854, and made her first Communion on the following Christmas morning in the chapel of the Sisters of Charity. In 1856 Miss Starr entered upon a larger field of labor. In Chicago she found her life work. She labored with her pen, and with the pencil illustrated her books. She lectured throughout the United States, and in the auditorium of her home annually gave a course of ten lectures upon art and literature.

Her published works include:

"Songs of a Lifetime"; "Patron Saints"; "Pilgrims and Shrines"; "Isabella of Castile"; "What we see"; "Ode to Christopher Columbus"; "Christmas-tide"; "Christian art in our own age"; "The Seven Dolours of the Virgin Mary"; "Literature of Christian Art"; "The Three Keys to the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican"; "Art in the Chicago Churches", published in the "New World"; "Woman's Work in Art"; and "The Three Archangels and the Guardian Angels in Art."

About 1856, she moved to Chicago, where she was one of the city's first teachers of art and the first to instruct her pupils from nature and casts. In addition to teaching for some twenty years in the auditorium of her home, she gave an annual series of ten lectures on painting, architecture, and the great artists of the Renaissance which contributed to the cultural life of the city.

Her art studio was destroyed in the great Chicago fire of 1871 and Miss Starr spent the next few years at St. Mary's College in South Bend, IN. She travelled extensively in Europe in 1875, and from her trip came many Catholic-themed books. She received the Papal Medal "The Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice" from Pope Leo XIII in 1899. In recognition for her work, she was the first woman to receive the Laetare Medal of the University of Notre Dame in 1885, awarded annually to a member of the Catholic laity for outstanding service to the Church. She received a gold medal at the World's Columbian Exposition of Chicago in 1893."

Note: Harvey Paul Newquist, Jr., husband of Patricia Starr (the half 8th cousin twice removed of Eliza), is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the first Arizona recipient of the Papal Medal "The Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontfice" from Pope John Paul II in 1987 in recognition of his service to the Catholic Church. His grandfather, John, arrived in Chicago at the time of the 1871 fire (which destroyed Eliza's art studio) , became a prominent builder, and a significant contributor to the 1893 Columbian Exposition.