Mary Louise "Sister Mary Joseph" Abell

Kelly, Jacques."Abell's table leads to a tale of a nun's lasting generosity." The Baltimore Sun 18 May 1997. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-05-18-1997138200-stor...

Excerpt:

When her father died, Mary Louise Abell became one of the richest women in Baltimore. Her drawing rooms overlooked the Washington Monument and its formal gardens. Her neighbors were the Garretts, the Walterses, the Tiffanys and the Whitridges, names to be reckoned with in the social world of 19th-century Baltimore.
None of this was for her. She gave her money away, took the veil of a cloistered nun and entered a life of prayer and silence two years after her father's death. James Cardinal Gibbons was present when she spoke her vows at the Georgetown monastery of the Order of the Visitation, Jan. 3, 1891. Her family arrived from Baltimore in their own private railroad cars.
Within a few years, she started directing her wealth toward building substantial new convents for Roman Catholic women of the Visitation order -- $140,000 (a staggering sum in 1890s money) went to build a graceful stone monastery surrounded by high walls in Wilmington, Del. That done, she gave more of the fortune amassed by her father for monasteries for the same order of religious women in Toledo, Ohio, and Ottawa, Canada.
She was given the name Sister Mary Joseph. She was never elected a mother superior. One account says she was content to repair the worn vestments used by priests when saying Masses. When she died in 1922, only a small obituary appeared in The Sun.