Nora Gleason: Cathedral's First Organist, Part 1

photo courtesy of the Diocesan Archives.

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Nora Gleason was the first organist for the Cathedral of the Madeleine. An accomplished musician and music teacher, she also served as organist and choir director in The Church of St. Mary Magdalen, the predecessor of the Cathedral of the Madeleine. She also served as Bishop Lawrence Scanlan's personal secretary. This photo was taken for the Official Souvenir Booklet for the Dedication of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, Aug. 15, 1909. 

The Bishop’s Dinner: A Benefit for the Cathedral of the Madeleine will be held Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008, with Bishop Wester at the Grand America Hotel. We hope all patrons of the Cathedral will continue to support this ongoing effort for preservation of this historic and architecturally significant building that stands as a beacon on our community.

by Gary Topping

Nora Gleason, an orphan from the Nevada mining camps, became Bishop Scanlan’ personal secretary and organist and choir director at the Cathedral of the Madeleine.

When Miss Nora Gleason’s short life came to an end at Salt Lake City’s Holy Cross Hospital on May 26, 1918, the newspaper obituaries could agree on her birth year – 1873— but not on her birthplace. The Deseret News identified it as Virginia City, Nevada, while the Intermountain Catholic said it was Silver City, Nevada. The Salt Lake Tribune gave her point of origin as "Silver Wreath," Utah (How we wish Utah geography had a place with such a name!). When one corrects that to "Silver Reef," the mining town near St. George, that birthplace becomes impossible, for miners did not begin to be attracted to the silver deposits there in significant numbers until 1875.

We know both of her parents’ names: She was named for her mother, and her father was Patrick L. Gleason. Her mother was born in Ireland in 1852 and so may have been her father, in 1839, though conflicting census records also show his birthplace as Pennsylvania. Patrick had died or was killed sometime between 1880 and 1893, possibly in a mining accident for which that occupation is infamous, though he was a machinist, not a miner. Even with no more hard data on Patrick Gleason than that, he was no doubt one of those hardy Irishmen who sought his fortune in America following the Potato Famine years in Ireland and upon whose brawny shoulders so much of the development of the American West had rested, in railroad construction, mining, or the army. The Comstock district on the slopes of the Sierras in western Nevada was one of the richest mining discoveries in American history, and there is every reason why Patrick would have been attracted to it and that its prosperity would have encouraged him to start his family there. That family consisted of himself and his wife, his daughter Nora, and a younger daughter born in 1876 in Nevada whose name is not recorded, but whose initials were E.A.

The wealth of the Comstock mines began to decline after 1878, and apparently it was that handwriting on the wall that brought the Gleasons sometime to Silver Reef, which was just beginning to hit its stride at that time, thus helping to explain the Tribune’s mistaken report that Nora had been born there. Although the Gleasons appear neither on plat maps in the late 1870s nor in the 1880 census, they probably arrived there sometime after 1876. It was evidently in Silver Reef where Father, later Bishop, Lawrence Scanlan met the Gleasons, for he boarded with them on his visits to the southern Utah mining towns.

Even as early as 1878, Silver Reef had been a thriving community, with over 700 residents and three quartz mills refining the silver ore. One traveler that year, a Catholic trader named Don Maguire, noted that most of the miners had come from the Nevada mines and had brought their families, building a "neat, clean, and thrifty" town. Although their Mormon neighbors predictably condemned the Silver Reefers’ saloons and gambling establishments, Maguire admired the community so much that he "was reluctant to leave it. I knew," he continued, "that its thoroughly civilized and American-like expression would contrast favorably with the Mormon towns of southern Utah."

Responding to the needs of a growing Catholic population, the energetic Fr. Scanlan built St. John’s Church and St. John’s Hospital in that community, both in 1879. St. Mary’s School, established at the same time, met in the church basement.

Like most mining towns, Silver Reef fell as quickly as it had risen. Most of the mines closed by 1884, and the population had declined so far that Fr. Scanlan could no longer justify the priests and nuns who staffed the Catholic complex. He abandoned the mission in 1885. The Gleasons, however, were long gone by that time, having moved north to the sustainable digs at Frisco by 1880.

Nora was not with them. She had left southern Utah by 1880 to attend St. Mary’s Academy in Salt Lake City as a seven-year-old boarding student. It must have been Fr. Scanlan who brought her to the capital city, especially in view of the close relationship he later enjoyed with Nora. Piano lessons were part of the curriculum at the school in Silver Reef. Apparently the nuns there had called Fr. Scanlan’s attention to her blossoming musical talent and he determined that she should have an opportunity to develop it as a service to the church and as a career for herself.

What we do know is that during those years immediately preceding 1893, Nora Gleason attended St. Mary’s School in Silver Reef (probably just 1879-1880), graduated from St. Mary’s Academy in Salt Lake City (probably about 1890) and completed formal musical training in Chicago. There she studied piano privately with W.S.B. Matthews and organ with Thomas Watson. Although the sketchy extant financial records of the Diocese of Salt Lake City (created in 1891) do not show financial support for Nora Gleason’s education, it is not at all implausible that Fr. Scanlan, who had a truly astounding ability to raise and manage money, may have done just that. Like paying for the education of a priest (there were no native Utahns in the seminary at the time, so any such funds he might have earmarked for them were being unused), Fr. Scanlan may have paid for Nora Gleason’s education with the stipulation that she then use it, in part, in service of the church. Whatever agreement they may have had, that is exactly the use to which Nora put her training; from the moment of her arrival in Salt Lake City until the installation of Bishop Scanlan’s successor, Bishop Joseph Glass, in 1915, Nora Gleason served as organist and choir director at the Church of St. Mary Magdalen then at the new Cathedral of the Madeleine, and as Bishop Scanlan’s personal secretary.

Topping is the archivist for the Diocese of Salt Lake City.

For further information on the Bishop’s Dinner contact Father Joseph Mayo or Ms. Laruel Dokos-Griffith at 328-8941.