Discover the History of St. Joseph's Seraphic Seminary

Words by Susan Manning, co-owner of Seminary Hill.

As part of our first-anniversary celebration in May 2022, we hosted an event on the history of St. Joseph's Seraphic Seminary, our namesake. The tower that anchors the view from The Tasting Room tops a multipurpose building that once housed a Franciscan seminary that educated young men interested in the priesthood. Today, it serves as a Job Corps that offers vocational training to low-income youth.

In the late nineteenth century, a boarding house, the Callicoon Mountain House, stood on the site overlooking the Delaware River. In 1901, the Franciscans opened St. Joseph's Seraphic Seminary on the site, housing students and faculty in the renovated boarding house while building today's structure.

The Kling family outside the Callicoon Mountain House.

Designed by the New York-based firm Wakeman and Miller, the four-story brick structure with a bluestone front was dedicated in 1911, with the archbishop from New York in attendance. (In homage to the earlier building, Seminary Hill uses bluestone to front the ground floor of the Cidery.)

St. Joseph's Seraphic Seminary was a boarding school for high-school-aged boys considering further study and ordination. According to research by John Conway, the Sullivan County historian, the school received accreditation in 1937 to offer an associate's degree and a high school diploma.

Vintage post card.

Creighton Drury, a student at St. Joseph's from 1960 to 1966, shared his experience attending the school in the talk given at Seminary Hill. Now a retiree in Callicoon, he outlined a typical student's day, waking up at 5:30, attending morning mass and evening prayers, mastering all the New York Regents exam subjects, playing competitive sports against area high schools, and doing manual labor around the campus. (One job was tending the dairy cows who grazed in what is now the Seminary Hill orchard.)

Although the seminary was "strict," the experience was "deeply spiritual." He and his fellow students made lifelong friendships and remained in touch.  

Several other former students also attended the Seminary Hill event. As they noted, fewer graduates became priests by the late 1960s and early 1970s, so the Franciscans sold the property to the US Department of Labor, which turned the campus into a Job Corps center.

Although the current program's focus differs significantly from St. Joseph's Seraphic Seminary, we hope the current students find the experience as transformational as their predecessors.