Linwood’s Last Hurrah: A beloved retreat house closes its doors
It was a Monday in November, and I was making s’mores with Sister Mary Dolan. Despite the group of teenage girls chatting and laughing around her, Sister Mary, as she was known to the students, looked as serene as always while standing in front of the firepit’s glow. When she stepped back and turned toward me, the marshmallows she was roasting were perfectly golden.
“The trick is patience,” she told me as we admired her handiwork. “You can’t get impatient.”
I recognized a familiar sentiment behind her advice: Do every little thing well, so the big things have strong foundations. This was how things were done at Notre Dame School of Manhattan, my high school alma mater, and the place where I first met Sister Mary and her fellow sisters of the Society of St. Ursula, the congregation that had founded the school.
But if my time at Notre Dame, an all-girls school in New York City, was defined by striving for quality and excellence in all things, it was also shaped by an appreciation for moments of joy and amusement. I recognized that side of Notre Dame in the increasingly playful behavior of the high school seniors who had come from my alma mater to go on retreat at Linwood Spiritual Center in Rhinebeck, N.Y., with the goal of learning to serve as retreat leaders for the younger classes.
As Sister Mary finished her marshmallows, the girls declared a game of manhunt. Upon someone’s count, they took off running in every direction, shrieking and bumping into each other as they went. It was late, and the isolated nature of the land on which Linwood sat meant the sky had grown very dark.
For a place known for its peace and quiet, our time at Linwood was busy, with plenty of conversation and action. We had started our day by moving furniture and decorations for the sisters, who owned and managed Linwood. The sisters were preparing to sell the property after spending over six decades there, and the secondary goal of the students’ visit was to help with organizing all of the possessions inside the center. Kathy Donnelly, S.U., a member of the retreat team at Linwood, told me they had intentionally stayed open until the girls could come up one last time and give the retreat house the finale it deserved.
The weight of this responsibility was not lost on the students and chaperones. Notre Dame teacher and retreat leader Kevin McDonald had explained that this experience would feel different from any retreat the girls had done in the past. They were not merely nourishing their own spiritual lives by being here. They were also providing a service to the sisters who were leaving their home and their ministry behind.
In the words of Sister Mary, this group would be Linwood’s “last hurrah.” As a Notre Dame alum, I wanted to experience the retreat alongside them to say goodbye, and as a reporter, I wanted to tell the story of the beloved retreat house’s final days.
A Place Where Time Passes Slowly
Linwood is situated on the east bank of the Hudson River, blessed with an awe-inspiring watershed view that is almost unbelievably picturesque. Inside the center, the sisters often left binoculars on coffee tables and windowsills because the landscape is vast and there are novel sights everywhere: beautiful birds in the trees, boats passing by, the silhouette of Esopus Meadows Lighthouse on the water, made small and blurry by distance.
The sisters have left most of the 55 acres of land undeveloped, and over the course of the students’ brief stay, the girls made good use of the open space. Bundled in scarves and puffer jackets, they sat huddled in groups on benches facing the water, or walked with arms linked up and down the sloping hills. They often gravitated to a few of the property’s more novel features, including two large wooden swings and a large playground roundabout—one of those dizzying metal disks that sends you flying right off when a dozen of your teenage classmates start spinning it as hard as they can.
During a free period in the evening, the girls left their phones and notebooks inside to go do cartwheels on the lawn and roll down the hill. Soon after, the teachers went outside and ushered the girls together for a group photo in front of the quickly setting sun.
Two of the girls, Anisa and Zoe, later told me they would remember the time spent wandering around the property as some of the most special moments of their retreat. They emphasized that being in such a peaceful place pushed them to engage more deeply in reflection and prayer.
“It helped that it was so distinctly different from normal life, especially coming from the city,” Anisa said, commenting on the beauty of the property and its silence and solitude. “Being in a place that you’re not used to, that’s new, it can help open up thoughts and feelings that are new too.”
Sister Kathy affirmed their observation of what she called the “timeless” nature of Linwood; its ability to make the days pass more slowly and make schedules feel immaterial. She told me it wasn’t just retreatants who felt this way, but the sisters who called Linwood home as well: “For those of us who lived there, who worked there,” she said, “you really had to make a conscious effort” to know what day of the week or month it was. Though there were often specific times for meals, prayer or gatherings, the time in between these markers “just moseyed around.”
She told me that some guests struggled with how long the days felt at Linwood, feeling an urge to maximize their time there in a structured way. But Sister Kathy’s advice to retreatants was to get lost in the day. “I used to say to people, you don’t need to come and do a lot of work and read this and read that. Go sit and watch the river for a day or two, then come and we’ll talk about it…. Let yourself be here first.”
She described how the landscape surrounding Linwood enabled people to reflect without inhibition and disruption, to let their thoughts flow as wide as the river in front of them and the sky above them. Offering access to this type of spiritual and emotional freedom is how she understood the mission of Linwood, at its heart.
“So many of us lead very busy, complicated, hurried lives,” she said. “We gave them the permission and the space to breathe slowly and to be in touch with God.”
Finding a Way
The Sisters of the Society of St. Ursula was founded by Anne de Xainctonge in France in 1606, after she was inspired by the Jesuits to create educational opportunities for young women. (They are distinct from the Ursuline Sisters, a different order founded by St. Angela Merici in Brescia, Italy, in 1535.)
The sisters came to New York in 1901, but the history of the land on which Linwood sits can be traced to the Dutch colonial period, when the royal governor of New York, Thomas Dongan, granted it to a group of early settlers. The first development of the property seems to have come at the hands of Dr. Thomas Tillotson, surgeon general in the Continental Army, who bought the land in 1779, built an estate for his family and called it Linwood.
Though the name has remained, the buildings and uses of the land have evolved over the decades. Following Tillotson’s death in 1832, the property passed through different hands until it was picked up by the Ruppert family, founder of Ruppert Knickerbocker Brewing, a beer brewing company, in the 1860s.
Jacob Ruppert bought the property as a summer home in 1888 while maintaining his primary residence in Manhattan. Upon his death, the property was passed to his son, Jacob Ruppert Jr. The son served four terms in the United States House of Representatives from 1899 to 1907. He also owned the New York Yankees from 1915 until 1939. When he died, he left Linwood to his nephew, Jacob Ruppert Schalk.
During his time in Rhinebeck, Schalk developed a relationship with a local Catholic priest named Robert Saccoman. Father Saccoman had been a frequent visitor to Linwood as a guest of Mr. Schalk and encouraged him to give the property to the Sisters of St. Ursula, who were living in the city of Kingston, across the river from Rhinebeck.
When Mr. Schalk died in 1962, he left his land and home to the sisters. Over the years that followed, sisters began moving there from Kingston, attempting to repurpose the property’s 22-room mansion—though it quickly became clear that the old mansion would not be suitable for their needs.
Instead, Sister Mary told us, the sisters made an arrangement with the Rhinebeck fire department to raze the mansion as part of a training exercise for their firefighters.“It suited us both,” she told us. A new building on the site was dedicated in 1968, with a guesthouse and pavilion added in 1976. They have remained standing since.
But change has come to Linwood yet again. The sisters announced in the spring of 2025 that they had made the decision to sell the property. Sister Kathy said the decision had “been coming for years.” They had brainstormed and researched ways to keep the retreat house open, to sustain their ministry. But the aging group of sisters also had to account for their own needs and factor in what their future might hold.
“There just came a point when we said, ‘I think the game is up,’” Sister Kathy told me. While it wasn’t exactly a surprise, she said, it was the type of decision you can never really prepare yourself for. But Sister Kathy pointed to the generations of sisters before her as being admirable models of what it means to handle great changes with grace and courage.
To wit: enduring the French Revolution; emigrating to the United States; opening a school that moved and then moved again; being given the Linwood property and opening the retreat house there.
“The sisters came in October [1901], not speaking any English, and by September the next year, they opened a school,” Sister Kathy told me, “How did they do that? Brave, brave ladies.”
“Nothing has been forever,” she remarked, regarding various ministries and homes the sisters have made for themselves. But she emphasized that the spirit of service and faith has continued from one place to another, stubbornly refusing to subside despite a world marked by impermanence: “We make it work.”
Doing What Is Needed
When the girls first arrived at Linwood last November, on a cold but sunny morning, Sister Mary greeted them, ushered them into the main conference room and sat them down. She put herself at the head of the room, directly in front of an icon of Anne de Xainctonge that was familiar from the walls of Notre Dame School.
“We all know who that is,” Sister Mary said, pointing to the picture of Anne. “We keep a picture of her here like we do at school to remind us that she is with us wherever we go. But now it is time to say goodbye to Linwood.”
Sister Mary explained that everything inside the retreat center was being relocated. Some items were being sold, some were being taken to Notre Dame and some would go with the sisters wherever they ended up. As Sister Mary put it, there would be “pieces of Linwood everywhere.” But much of it still needed to be physically moved and packed.
One of the most challenging areas to clean out was an awkward storage area in the back of the chapel, accessible only by a slanted entrance very low to the ground. The sisters, all older women, would struggle to comfortably venture into the closet to remove the dozens of vases and candles and artwork back there without hurting themselves. So they recruited their young guests for help.
A few girls positioned themselves in the closet and handed objects out to Mr. McDonald, who handed each item, one by one, to a line of more girls, who took turns carrying them to an open room just down the hall where the items could be sorted and stored.
One girl was handed a set of tarnished gold altar bells, which chimed loudly every time she took a step. Another had a grimace on her face as she held a vase with a dead bug inside way out in front of her body. When picking up a sharp object, one girl nicked her finger. One of the sisters swooped in, taking her to get a Band-Aid. When the two of them returned, they were laughing together.
Despite preparing to sell their property and move out of their rooms in the retreat house, the Sisters of St. Ursula and the Linwood staff maintained their spirit of hospitality and care. They were hosting, feeding and caring warmly for the girls up until the end of the retreat. Zoe remarked on their hospitality during our conversation. “If I was preparing to move away from my home and all these people were there, I’m not sure I would be so nice,” she confessed, “but they were so welcoming.”
Sister Kathy spoke candidly about the reality of the situation she found herself in more broadly. “It’s not something that I ever imagined myself doing,” she said, laughing, when I asked her about what it was like to manage the sale of the property and the sisters’ move. But there was a need, and she rose to meet it.
This reminded me of something Mr. McDonald had told the Notre Dame students during a moment of instruction. In March, this group of girls would lead a Kairos retreat for the junior class. When prompted with the question “Why do you want to be a retreat leader?” many of the girls expressed that they wanted to help their younger Notre Dame sisters have a meaningful and positive experience.
Mr. McDonald suggested that being a successful leader would require humility and flexibility, a willingness to “do what is needed” for the girls they were leading, even when it wasn’t what they wanted or expected to do. In Sister Kathy and her fellow sisters, they were lucky enough to have strong examples of this type of undaunted selflessness in action.
Pieces of Linwood Everywhere
While the girls had carried items into now empty libraries and sitting rooms, the Notre Dame chaperones had stood near the altar in the chapel engaged in conversation, trying to decide what to take back to Notre Dame School with them.
They had already resolved to bring several paintings and pieces of artwork to the school and were focusing their attention on the dozens of chairs in the chapel. “We could put them in the library,” Sister Mary suggested.
It was clearly a lot of work to get everything sold or distributed. Sister Kathy seemed to be constantly on the move—taking art off the walls, talking with visitors who had come to collect furniture, making arrangements with Sister Mary.
Mr. McDonald noticed a birdhouse painted to look like a church, which (with permission) he unscrewed from a tree to take home with him. Sister Mary wanted to take dishes and silverware from Linwood back to the school because “there were no more bowls in the faculty lounge.” At one point she walked into the main conference room with a Frisbee and a pickleball set and asked if anyone wanted them. They were quickly claimed.
One set of objects maintained a particular importance: the stained-glass windows from the retreat house chapel. The Notre Dame chaperones discussed their plan to take the windows back to the school. They could try to fit them in the small school chapel, or use them for adornment in the school hallways, the library or another common space.
At that moment, the windows were still in their home at Linwood. I asked Sister Kathy about them, and despite all she was already doing, she took the time to explain a bit of their story. I learned that the windows featured the virgin martyrs of the Church and that Linwood was not their first home: They had been commissioned for Marygrove, the sisters’ previous residence in Kingston. Like the sisters themselves, these windows had seen and endured change already, and would be capable of doing so again.
After my conversation with Sister Kathy, I was inspired to take another peek in the chapel. On my way into the room, I noticed a sign on the wall with a poem from the writer May Sarton. The second stanza was particularly striking:
No one comes here
who is not made aware
of this constant spiritual
weaving in the air.
No one comes here
who is not amazed
by the richness of the silence
who is not nourished
and amazed.
These words replayed in my head as I opened the door to the chapel, which was dim and silent. Across the hall, I could hear the girls gathered in the main meeting room, acting out skits and chatting enthusiastically.
In our conversation, Zoe had remarked on the similarity between the experiences of the sisters and of the girls on retreat. “I think it’s good that we were all seniors,” Zoe added, “because we’re about to say goodbye to the school and each other. So we can understand a little bit about what they’re going through by having to leave.” That was the retreat at its core: two generations of women each helping prepare the other for what came next, different as they may be.
The girls across the hall would soon leave Linwood, ready to lead other retreats for other students in other places. In June, they would graduate and pass the baton to new leaders. Those leaders, and the leaders after them, would not know Linwood at all. But they would be part of a legacy of service to others that can be traced to the saints on its walls, and that has lived so beautifully in generations of brave sisters and finds new life in classes of Notre Dame students every year.
I imagined the windows hanging in the halls of Notre Dame School, carrying memories of Linwood and Marygrove before it. I imagined someone taking time to explain where the windows had come from and what they symbolized to new generations of young women, as Sister Kathy had done for me.
When I finally emerged from the chapel, the chatter had halted; the group had dispersed for more minutes of personal reflection. The girls were scattered in various rooms, some on the floor, some draped on couches and armchairs, all bent over notebooks or lost in thought.
For this group of people in particular, a return to daily life would mean facing uncertainty and unresolved issues. Most of the girls still did not know where they were going to college. Many of the sisters still needed to determine where they would land. And the questions of who would own Linwood and what would happen to the space were still unanswered.
These concerns had not disappeared. But for just a moment, the timelessness of Linwood worked its magic. The world seemed to slow almost to a standstill, granting all of us a precious opportunity to ready ourselves for whatever would come next. I prayed that all of us might trust God enough to take Sister Mary’s advice and be patient while we waited for clarity and certainty to find us.
Through the big windows, a band of pink sunlight peeked through gray clouds over the Hudson. Our November sky wasn’t warm exactly, but clear and calm. The richness of the silence covered all of us like a thick blanket on a cold morning. Nourished and amazed, indeed.
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