St. Joseph’s Seminary, Troy

Since March is dedicated to St. Joseph, it’s a good time to feature institutions dedicated in his name. Seen here is St. Joseph’s Seminary, which served as a provincial seminary for New York between 1864 and 1896. Dioceses in New York are gathered into an ecclesiastical province covering the state, so St. Joseph’s was a sort of statewide seminary. It produced over seven hundred priests during its existence. In 1896 it was replaced by St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, which served (and continues to serve) as the seminary for the Archdiocese of New York. Among its early faculty was the Rev. Alexander Sherwood Healy (1836-1875), who taught Moral Theology in the seminary’s first years of existence. He was one of the first Afrian-American priests in the United States. His brother Patrick, a Jesuit, became President of Georgetown in 1874, and his brother James became Bishop of Portland in 1875.