Two miles south of the courthouse sits the campus of Saint Joseph's College, a small Catholic liberal-arts college founded by the Society of the Precious Blood in 1889. The college suspended operations in 2017 under crushing debt, but the campus remains intact and the order has been slowly reopening parts of it as event space and a small two-year programme. Several individual buildings — among them the Charles Halleck Student Center and Schwietermann Hall — are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the chapel and the broad, tree-lined approach drive are quietly impressive. Across the highway, the 1888 St. Joseph Indian Normal School, an experimental training school for Native American teachers that operated briefly under Mother Katharine Drexel, is also on the register.
Saint Joseph's College Campus
A story
Saint Joseph's was the home of the Indianapolis Colts' summer training camp from 1984 to 1998, the only Catholic college in the country to host an NFL team's pre-season. The deal ended when the Colts moved camp closer to home, and the college itself ran out of money two decades later, suspending operations at the end of the 2016–2017 academic year.