Back in 1867, in a great four story brown stone mansion in lower Manhattan, not far from City Hall and on the spot where the Chrysler Building now stands was born a baby girl named Anne into a wealthy merchant family.  Anne was the youngest of four children, her older siblings were three brothers. Her father and mother were members of New York’s first Catholic Church, St. Peter’s, on Barclay Street. Little could they then have imagined that only two blocks away at 154 Greenwich Street, where the Smith family had a lucrative candy business, would be built the world’s tallest buildings, the two World Trade Towers, one hundred years later. On a spring day in 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, the godparents took the baby girl for her Baptism at St. Peter’s. It would be there that she would one day attend elementary school and be taught by the Sisters of Charity. At the age of seventeen she told her millionaire socialite parents that she felt called to be a nun. Anne’s father protested and told her if she did he would never speak to her again and that she would be cut out of his will. 
    On the day that the Sisters came for Anne in 1884 her mother and brothers kissed her goodbye while her father stayed in his room and in those days it was certainly a goodbye as once you entered the Convent you were seldom permitted to visit home unless it was a funeral or someone was dying. Parents and family were on occasion allowed to visit a nun in a Convent but the nun seldom left even in the teaching orders at that time and that is what it took for Anne to visit home again.  Anne herself was given a religious name, Sister Mary Loretta. 
  In 1896, Sr. Mary Loretta's father was now dying and he asked that his daughter be allowed to come home to him for the last time.   Her father’s funeral Mass was at St. Peter’s Church, Manhattan, and he was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Queens. Sr. Mary Loretta returned to her Convent in upper Manhattan and continued to work as a nun and a nurse ministering to the poor souls that were suffering from tuberculosis and mental disturbances on Blackwell Island now Roosevelt Island in New York City.
    When her father's will was read out to the shock of all present, Sr. Mary Loretta, who was not present, was to receive from her father as much as her three brothers received which was five million dollars. Sr. Mary Loretta, since she had taken a vow of poverty, willingly gave the $5,000,000 to the Sisters of Mercy with only one request that they would use it to build orphanages, which they did. The first one built was in Tarrytown.
    Eight years later, Sr. Mary Loretta herself, like her poor patients, would came down with tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight, twenty-one years after she entered the Sisters of Mercy.  Sr. Mary Loretta joined her father in her eternal repose ten days before Easter Sunday on April 13, 1905 in a little room at St. Catherine’s Convent on 163rd Street in New York City. Sr. Mary Loretta was buried in the Sisters of Mercy section of Calvary Cemetery not far from her father. 
  Her three brothers wanted to honor her life of Christian self-denial, service, sacrifice, suffering, death, thus, donated funds to build the Catholic Chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary in Poughkeepsie on the grounds of the Hudson River State (Psychiatric) Hospital.  Sister Mary Loretta Smith's name is still memorialized on the marble plaque hanging on the wall in Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel wall.  At its dedication, the Pastor of St. Peter’s, Monsignor Joseph Sheahan, was also present for Holy Mass  with Cardinal Farley and the Mayor of Poughkeepsie, George Hine. On that day, the organist was Grace Ward and the soloist was William McCourt both of whom had relatives who were members of St. Peter’s Parish (as of 2007).  Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel was served for many years by the Jesuit priests associated with St. Andrew's Seminary.