Charles Felix Van Quickenborne

Charles Felix Van Quickenborne (1788–1837) was born in Petegem, near Deinze, Belgium on 21 January 1788. Van Quickenborne is best known as the founder of St. Louis University. He became a Jesuit in Ghent, Belgium in 1815, and, at his request, was sent to the American Missions in 1817. He was appointed Superior and Novice Master of the Jesuit novitiate in White Marsh, Maryland, in 1819.

In the early 1820s the Bishop of the Louisiana Territory, Louis Du Bourg, invited the Society of Jesus to come to the newly admitted state of Missouri. In 1823, twelve young Belgian Jesuits travelled to Missouri with six African-American slaves: Moses and Nancy, Thomas and Molly, Isaac and Susan, each husband and wife. The Jesuits forced the enslaved couples to leave their children behind; they expected their slaves would produce more children in Missouri. Led by Father Quickenborne, the group left a struggling Jesuit plantation near White Marsh, Maryland and made their way west, first to the Ohio River, then by flatboat down the Ohio River, and then on foot across Illinois.

In 1823 Father Quikenborne and his group moved west to Missouri’s Florissant Valley, about twenty miles northwest of St. Louis, where Bishop Du Bourg had given the Jesuits a tract of land. With a subsidy from the government of President James Monroe, Van Quickenborne began a school for Native Americans.

When the Jesuits and their slaves arrived in St. Louis, they went north to Florissant Farm — now a suburb bordering Ferguson, Mo. The six slaves were crammed into a single cabin under awful conditions. They worked from five in the morning to the evening. The Jesuits whipped and beat the slaves, especially Fr. Charles Felix Van Quickenborne, S.J., the leader of the contingent who was nicknamed “Napoleon.”

Father van Quickenbourne had opened St. Regis Seminary, a school for young Indian boys, at Florissant, Mo. in May 1824. In late 1824 he wrote to the Superior General of the Jesuits about opening a college in St. Louis on land he had purchased at auction. The beginnings of Saint Louis University as a Jesuit institution may be dated from the period (second half of 1825) at which white students were first received by Father van Quickenborne at St. Regis Seminary.

The following is the first certified baptism:

• "A neosho chez Mr. Ligueste Chouteau", (at Neosho in the home of Mr. Ligueste Chouteau), 27 August 1827, Father Van Quickenborne baptized Henri Mongrain, "Son of Noel pere and of Tonpapai, age two years, sponsor Mr. Ligueste P. Chouteau" (baptismal register, St. Ferdinand's church, Florissant, Missouri). Father Van Quickenborne said the first verifiable Mass in Kansas two days earlier at St. Paul in Neosho County.
• In 1837, Father Van Quickenborne baptized 14 Indian children in a Potawatomi camp just outside Fort Leavenworth.

The parish of the Cathedral of St. Raphael in Dubuque, Iowa, traces its origin to 1833 when the first group of settlers gathered to celebrate Mass. Father Van Quickenborne began organizing them into a parish and planning for a church building. His final journey west, however, began before the materials could be assembled.

Father Charles Felix Van Quickenborne died on 17 August 1837 at age 49 and is buried at Florissant, Missouri.

His missionary work among the Kickapoos was taken over by the Dutch Jesuit father Hoecken.