The Kemper Center is an arts and culture venue in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But for more than a century, it was the site of Kemper Hall, an all-girls Episcopal high school, named for Bishop Jackson Kemper, the Episcopal Church’s 19th-century “apostle to the West.”
Kemper Hall’s alumnae, now in their 70s and 80s, are worried that new plans for the site owned by Kenosha County will force them and their small museum out of the location, erasing the legacy of the school’s alumnae and the nuns who taught them.
Kemper’s alumnae association has had a lease with the center for many years to store its memorabilia and artifacts, many of which are on display for the public. The association would rent more space from Kemper Center Inc., the nonprofit agency that operates the facility, if it could. But the association does not know if it will be free to renew the lease, and it could be facing up to three years of not knowing.
“We don’t bring the money flow they would get from someone else,” said Sue McKnight, a member of Kemper’s class of 1966.
The center rents Kemper’s former dormitories as small offices for local nonprofit agencies, and freeing additional rental space could help support its other programming and maintenance for the site’s 19th-century buildings.
In 2023, the center hired a research firm to examine a more sustainable future for the center. Because the buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places, the complex will not be torn down, but there could still be a significant shift in how the center uses the space.
“I have assured them they’re a vital part of this,” said Robin Ingrouille, the center’s interim executive director. “I’m very optimistic that we can move forward in peace and grow and work with the alumnae.” McKnight says she knows Ingrouille is on the alumnae’s side, but she’s not sure about the center’s board, or what a potential future director would think.
Ingrouille, who has worked at the center for decades, became interim executive director last year. The previous director, Daniel Gaschke, left after less than five months because of scandal related to the legitimacy of his appointment and his handling of the job, as reported by the Kenosha County Eye.
Other alumnae, like Anna Antaramian McGuire, have said they have been frustrated by how easily their relationship with the board can shift based on elections, and by how it feels like their financial support to the center has been ignored.
The alumnae have spoken with St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy, an Episcopal school in Delafield, Wisconsin, with historic links to Kemper Hall, about moving their museum there, but the academy does not have any space. They also tried asking the DeKoven Center in Racine, another former Episcopal school site, but that center is also not in a place to help.
The reorganization of Wisconsin’s three dioceses into one makes the alumnae wary of asking overstretched clergy and diocesan employees to give them priority, but they hope there might be more possibility of assistance once the merger is settled. “We think the Episcopal Church should somehow preserve this,” said McKnight, who attends St. Thomas of Canterbury Church in Greendale, Wisconsin.
The Kemper Center’s story as its own entity began in 1975, when an alumna named Penny Palmer spearheaded a campaign to purchase the site so it would not be torn down after the school closed in 1974.
The history of Kemper Hall and its end will be familiar to many: the vastly changing cultural landscape of the 1960s and ’70s meant it was no longer feasible as an institution. Kemper Hall was a school from another era, with veils on a table for girls to put on before entering chapel. Most students were boarders, another educational option that grew less popular.
“When I was there, things were breaking up. Sisters were leaving. It was the ’60s, and everything was nuts,” said Barbara Axelson, who would have finished in the class of 1965 if she had not left to attend a public high school in Kenosha. “For highly educated, productive women, it must have been a struggle to commit to the spiritual life and teach. That spiritual commitment that I don’t understand is amazing to me—that women were willing to completely commit their lives to it.”
The school was run by the Community of St. Mary, an Episcopal women’s religious order that at one time ran numerous schools around the United States. The sisters did not focus on gaining new vocations among their students.
“They wanted us to get out there, go to college, and help people,” said Sammy McMinn, who was in the class of 1972. “They were women who were capable and had chosen this life, and chose to give themselves to help other women live in a world that’s constantly changing,” said Antaramian McGuire, class of 1965.
By the time McMinn attended, all the sisters were elderly and retired. She has found architectural drafts from 1968 for an expanded wing. She believes the sisters thought they were going to receive a large endowment from somewhere that didn’t come through, but she will never know. “The sisters didn’t leave any records,” she said. The last sister of the Community of St. Mary’s Western Province died in 2023 at age 103.
There are a lot of records of the students and what their lives were like, and the alumnae association does not want this unique chapter in the history of Kenosha, and in the Episcopal Church in Wisconsin, to be forgotten.
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
