Within a year of her arrival in the United States, Frances Xavier Cabrini began searching for a property outside the slums of Manhattan where she could establish an orphanage and summer retreat for the children in her care. She found a wooded ridge of about four hundred and fifty acres above the Hudson River near West Park, New York, and bought it cheaply in 1890.
Within days the sisters discovered why it had been cheap. The property had no surface water. The wells the previous owner had dug had run dry. The Hudson lay six hundred feet below at the foot of a sheer cliff. Without water there could be no orphanage.
According to the testimony of the sisters who accompanied her — written down within Mother Cabrini's lifetime — she walked the property in silence with the others, stopped at the highest point of the ridge, drove her cane into the ground in three separate places, and said to her sisters in Italian: 'Dig here. Saint Joseph will provide the water.'
The sisters dug. Water rose from each of the three points. The orphanage was built, and the spring became a pilgrimage site within Mother Cabrini's lifetime; the saint herself would draw the water and bless the children with it. The land is now the Saint Cabrini Shrine of West Park; the spring still flows; her body, before its 1933 translation to Manhattan, rested in a small chapel above the spring.
Of the Catholic miracle traditions associated with US territory — apart from the canonization-anchoring healings of the various sisters and the medical recoveries at her tomb — Mother Cabrini's Spring is the most popularly venerated, the one to which Italian-American devotion has always returned.