From Faith and Depression to Full University:

The Long History of the University of Providence in Great Falls, Montana

Origins in Crisis: Religion, Education, and the Great Depression

In the summer of 1932, the United States was nearly three years into the worst economic collapse in its history. Montana's agricultural economy, already battered by drought and falling commodity prices through the 1920s, had contracted further still. Against this backdrop, the Catholic Diocese of Great Falls moved to establish a new institution of higher education in a city of roughly 25,000 people on the high plains of central Montana. The effort was improbable by any practical measure, yet it succeeded. What began as a small junior college operating out of a borrowed convent building would over the following nine decades evolve through five name changes across six distinct institutional eras, undergoing a series of structural transformations to become the University of Providence.

The founding of the institution reflected both the ambitions of the Catholic Church in the region and the particular character of two religious communities that had been building institutions in Montana since before statehood. The Sisters of Providence, a congregation founded in Montreal in 1843 by Emilie Tavernier Gamelin, had arrived in Great Falls in 1892 at the invitation of Father J. James Dols, the first pastor of Saint Ann's Cathedral, to open the city's first hospital. They established Columbus Hospital that year, and two years later founded the Columbus School of Nursing, which operated as Montana's first formal nursing school.

The Sisters of the Order of Saint Ursula, known as the Ursulines, had come to Montana in 1884 and by 1912 had opened the Ursuline Academy on Central Avenue in Great Falls—a six-story brick and terra cotta structure designed in the Collegiate Gothic style by Great Falls architect George Shanley. That building, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, would provide the physical home for the new college in its earliest years.

The Two-College Problem

The immediate impetus for founding the institution lay in a collision of plans between two Catholic communities operating in different dioceses. In July 1929, at the request of Bishop George J. Finnigan of Helena, the Sisters of Providence began planning a normal school for teacher training intended to be located in Missoula. Meanwhile, in the Diocese of Great Falls, the Ursuline Sisters had independently begun drawing plans in 1930 for a junior college for women in Great Falls. The prospect of two separate Catholic colleges for women in the same state, each serving overlapping constituencies and competing for limited resources, alarmed the bishops of both dioceses. The solution was consolidation.

Bishop Edwin Vincent O'Hara, who had been installed as the second Bishop of Great Falls on November 5, 1930, emerged as the driving force behind that consolidation. O'Hara was not a figure of narrow provincial ambitions. Born in 1881 in Lanesboro, Minnesota, the son of Irish immigrant farmers, he had been ordained in 1905 and had spent his pre-episcopal career in Oregon, where he played a central role in defeating a state ballot measure that would have required all children to attend public schools, effectively outlawing Catholic education. He had also founded the National Catholic Rural Life Conference in 1923, reflecting a sustained concern for education and community welfare in sparsely populated regions. By the time he arrived in Great Falls, he brought both organizational skill and a national reputation as an advocate for Catholic education in rural America.

In June of 1932, Bishop O'Hara announced the opening of the new institution, stating its purpose was to enable young women of eastern Montana to receive the valuable training of a Catholic higher education. The two proposed institutions were merged under the direction of the Diocese of Great Falls, creating a collaborative administrative framework. Academic operations were conducted by the Ursuline Sisters in conjunction with the Sisters of Providence. Father J.A. Rooney, STL, MA, was named first president, with Sister Lucia Sullivan of the Sisters of Providence and Mother Ignatius of the Ursuline Order serving as his advisors and acting administrators. First classes were held in the Ursuline Academy. Faculty consisted of several sisters, a few priests, and a single lay woman.

From its opening, the institution bore two names depending on the academic track. The junior college component was called the Great Falls Junior College for Women, while Sister Lucia Sullivan established the Great Falls Normal School the following year to train teachers. This dual-school framework operated as an administrative union of convenience, with the normal school holding its courses in the recently remodeled Our Lady of Providence Hall at Columbus Hospital—a location that inspired the institution to adopt Our Lady of Providence as its patron saint. In its first academic year, fourteen women enrolled. By 1935, combined registration across both tracks totaled 105 women, underscoring the institution's early focus on expanding female higher education on the high plains.

Growth, Consolidation, and a New Campus

The college became coeducational in 1937, when the first male student enrolled. By 1938 there were nineteen men in attendance, and the institution had transitioned from a two-year junior college to a four-year institution offering baccalaureate degrees both to its own students and to nursing students at Columbus Hospital. The two programs had never been formally unified, each operating under a separate religious community, but their geographic proximity and shared Catholic mission had always made the distinction more administrative than practical.

In 1942, declining enrollment forced the closure of the junior college component, and the Ursuline Order withdrew from the institution entirely. The normal school track effectively absorbed the remaining academic programs. The Diocese of Great Falls transferred full sponsorship to the Sisters of Providence the following year, and the institution was reorganized as a single, unified liberal arts college. The name Great Falls College of Education was adopted in 1942, and by the early 1950s, the institution was known simply as the College of Great Falls, operating out of the old Columbus Hospital facility.

The physical limitations of the hospital campus had always constrained the college's ambitions. In 1944, the Sisters of Providence purchased land on 20th Street South, on the southern edge of the city. Through the 1950s, working with Father Jacob Donovan, the second president of the college, the sisters developed plans for a purpose-built campus. Under Sister Rita of the Sacred Heart, the third president, those plans were realized.

The new campus opened in September of 1960, with eleven buildings designed by Page Werner Architects at a total cost of more than three million dollars. Faculty offices occupied the north end of a classroom building; administrative offices were housed in the library building. A women's residence hall called Emilie Hall, named for the congregation's foundress, provided on-campus housing for students for the first time.

Physical expansion continued through the 1960s. In 1964, Providence Tower was added to the campus chapel, becoming a landmark visible across the surrounding neighborhood. The McLaughlin Memorial Athletic Center opened the following year. In 1967, with the growth of a formal men's intercollegiate basketball program, the college adopted the Argonaut (often shortened to "Argo") as its mascot and athletics nickname, a choice that has persisted to the present.

Name Changes and Structural Shifts

The college's mission had always extended beyond the main Great Falls campus. For many years, the institution operated a residential learning center on the Fort Belknap Reservation and a continuing education center in Lewistown, as well as programming at Malmstrom Air Force Base. A distance learning program eventually served more than thirty sites across Montana, southern Alberta, and Wyoming.

In September of 1995, the College of Great Falls was renamed the University of Great Falls, reflecting both a broadening of academic programs and a desire to signal institutional ambition in a competitive higher education environment. By the early 2000s, the university offered undergraduate degrees in more than twenty programs and several master's degree programs.

The most consequential change in the institution's recent history came in 2017. In June of that year, the University of Great Falls and Providence St. Joseph Health announced a new partnership that included a substantial institutional investment and a commitment to make the university the primary education provider for the Providence health system's more than 110,000 employees. Effective July 1, 2017, the institution was renamed the University of Providence. The name was chosen to acknowledge both the founding role of the Sisters of Providence and the continuing institutional relationship with the Providence health system. A new School of Health Professions was established as part of the partnership, reflecting the same vocational orientation toward health care that had characterized the Sisters of Providence's work in Montana since Columbus Hospital opened in 1892.

Institutional Context and Current Standing

The renaming of 2017 completed a cycle of institutional identity that in many respects had been implicit in the college's origins. The Sisters of Providence had arrived in Great Falls before the institution existed, had built Montana's first nursing school, and had ultimately emerged as the sole sponsoring religious community after the Ursuline withdrawal in 1942. The institution's historical iterations tracked broader changes in American Catholic higher education: the postwar expansion of Catholic colleges into four-year liberal arts institutions, the professionalization of academic programs in the 1990s, and the emergence in the 2000s of strategic partnerships between Catholic universities and health care systems sponsored by the same religious congregations.

The University of Providence today occupies its 44-acre campus on 20th Street South in Great Falls, the same land purchased by the Sisters of Providence in 1944. Accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, it enrolls approximately 630 students in undergraduate and graduate programs. The motto adopted by the institution, In lumine tuo videmus lumen, a phrase taken from Psalm 36, translates as In Thy Light We See Light, and reflects the theological grounding of a Catholic liberal arts tradition that has persisted across nine decades and five name changes.

The institution's history is embedded in a larger story about the role of women religious in building educational infrastructure on the Northern Plains. The Sisters of Providence and the Ursulines were not peripheral to Montana's development: they arrived before most of the settlers around them, built the first hospital, opened the first nursing school, educated generations of women who had no access to other forms of higher education, and created institutions that have outlasted the communities and social conditions that first called them into being. The University of Providence carries that history forward on a campus shaped by decisions made during the Great Depression, the postwar boom, and the ongoing restructuring of Catholic higher education in the American West.

Works Cited

Diocese of Great Falls-Billings. "About." Diocese of Great Falls-Billings Official Website. https://diocesegfb.org/home-page/about/. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Dolan, Timothy M. Some Seed Fell on Good Ground: The Life of Edwin V. O'Hara. Catholic University of America Press, 1992.

Encyclopedia.com. "Montana, Catholic Church in." Encyclopedia of Catholicism. https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/montana-catholic-church. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Historic Montana. "Ursuline Academy." Montana National Register of Historic Places. https://historicmt.org/items/show/218. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Providence St. Joseph Health. "Providence in the West: A Timeline, 1856-Present." Providence Archives. https://www.providence.org/-/media/project/psjh/providence/socal/files/about/providence-archives/webtimelineupdatedmar2021.pdf. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Sisters of Providence. "Last Sisters of Providence Leave Ministry in Montana." Sisters of Providence, Mother Joseph Province. https://sistersofprovidence.net/last-sisters-of-providence-leave-ministry-in-montana/. Accessed 2 June 2026.

University of Providence. "History and Tradition." University of Providence Official Website. https://www.uprovidence.edu/faith-service/history-and-tradition/. Accessed 2 June 2026.

University of Providence. "History." University of Providence Undergraduate Catalog. https://uprovidence-public.courseleaf.com/undergraduate/general-information/history/. Accessed 2 June 2026.

University of Providence Athletics. "University Announces Name Change, New School of Health Professions." Argo Athletics Official Site, 13 June 2017. https://upargos.com/news/2017/6/13/general-university-announces-name-change-new-school-of-health-professions.aspx. Accessed 2 June 2026.