On Monday Feb. 24, the Student Government Association’s (SGA) Mission Committee along with the Alumnae Association at Saint Mary’s College hosted the “Riedinger House Tour” from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Riedinger House for Heritage Week. Students were able to participate by filling out a form provided in an email.
The tour started off with an introduction to Riedinger House by the executive director of alumnae relations and advancement Kara M. O’Leary. Each attendee was able to receive a card slip that contained brief information on both the history of the Riedinger House and the establishment of the Alumnae Association.
In the living room, O'Leary discussed about the first mother and daughter legacy at Saint Mary’s, Adaline Crowley Riedinger (1864) and Mary Adalaide Riedinger (1889), in which the house was named after and was a gift provided by the family. It was built in 1939 for home economics majors and became a practice house where students would spend several weeks to demonstrate their domestic skill. It then became an alumnae house after the home economics major was no longer available in the 1960s.
She also mentioned how the house is now currently used for officially approved college affairs with different advisory boards, previous commencement speakers and remote staff workers who would raise funds for the College. She provided a brief anecdote to president Katie Conboy’s stay at Riedinger House for eight weeks when she began her term in 2020, due to construction delays of her house. The only other president to have fully lived at Riedinger House was Monsignor John McGrath during his eighteen month term.
The house was designed on a seventh-eighth scale in order to save money on materials during its construction. The home consists of a living room, kitchen and upper hallway. The upper hallway includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a current study space that was previously used as a sewing room for home economics majors. Within the living room, yearbooks were present for class years, including from 1926 to 2016.
As part of Heritage Week, the tour serves as a way for Saint Mary’s students to know about the College’s roots and be able to interact with parts of the college’s history that they may not be as familiar with.
Associate director of alumnae relations Grace Maher (‘21) stated more about the purpose of the Reidinger House tour being offered and what it means for students.
“We are hosting this as part of the Heritage Week, which celebrates the College and all of its traditions and our history. Since Riedinger House is so integral to that history, it’s sort of a little secret, a little gem here on campus, we wanted to open it up and give people the chance to see it,” Maher said.
As mentioned by Maher, the Alumnae Association is the seventh oldest alumnae association globally and the oldest Catholic women’s college alumnae association since its founding in 1879. All graduates of Saint Mary’s are automatically part of the Alumnae Association and currently have more than 18,000 members in the organization. The Association has hosted a variety of events pertaining to alumni and graduation rituals.
“We’ll always host an event for legacy students at welcome week … We also host our champagne brunch every year which is part of senior week, which is where we get to welcome the graduating seniors into the Alumnae Association formally right before their graduation. Possibly, the biggest lift of the Office of Alumnae Relations and the Alumnae Association is reunion which is hosted every year, every summer, first weekend in June, where we welcome back specific class years celebrating milestone reunions anywhere from five to over 50 years since their graduation,” Maher said.
Junior Bethany Berlage, mission co-chair in SGA, explains about the collaboration with the Alumnae Association and being able to bring back a forgotten tradition from the archives into Saint Mary’s.
“We actually talked about just doing Riedinger House for Heritage Week and the Alumnae Association reached out to us and said we’ve offered tours before … and we thought that would be really great. I’m a student rep on the alumnae board, so I’ve worked with a lot of these people before, so it was kind of fun to collaborate with them on something different as well,” Berlage mentioned.
Students who attended the Riedinger House tour were able to learn more about the history of Saint Mary’s, including previous majors that were offered and the context behind the establishment of the house.
“It was really nice as a Saint Mary’s student to learn more about the past and what previous women have done throughout their time here. It makes me feel closer and it’s such a great thing overall to have,” Olivia Coyne, a senior at Saint Mary's said.
Berlage mentioned further upcoming events that will be hosted by SGA throughout the upcoming week that includes collaborations with other organizations, including the donor challenge on Wednesday and the dining hall on Friday for French-themed dinner services.
