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.”

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