The home later became an orphanage, and a convent was established to staff it, which led to an influx, after World War I, of young Catholic women on missions from all over the world, though a good ninety percent of them were from Ireland or England. For decades the nuns were actually the most worldly element of Malloy, a town otherwise composed mostly of farmers and, from the 1930s onward, workers at the maximum-security prison near Plattsburgh. Such was the church’s civic influence that the convent went on to establish a school, called St. Catherine’s, in 1939, open to Catholic children of either gender. Over the decades, the prison expanded, the town correspondingly thrived, but the congregation, somehow, inexorably shrank. The orphanage was closed in the sixties, the convent in the seventies. The school, though, stayed open, and was still thought of, at least by those who could afford it, as a worthy alternative to Malloy’s one public elementary school, infamous for its dangerously low standards in all respects.
