Nelson Baker fought at Gettysburg with the 74th New York, came home, and prospered in a feed business before entering the seminary at thirty-one. Ordained in 1876, he was sent to a failing orphanage and protectory at Limestone Hill, south of Buffalo, which was forty thousand dollars in debt. He wrote to Catholic women across the United States asking twenty-five cents each for an Association of Our Lady of Victory, and he paid the debt off.
What he then built over fifty years was a small city of charity: a home for infants, a maternity hospital that took unmarried mothers and asked no names, a boys' protectory, a school, a hospital. In 1891 he needed fuel he could not pay for, buried a medal of Our Lady of Victory at a spot on the property, and told the drillers to dig there; at something over thirteen hundred feet they struck gas, and the wells heated his institutions for decades. Read it as you like — Buffalo mostly read it as the answer to the medal.
In 1926 he finished the church he had wanted, Our Lady of Victory, and Rome made it a minor basilica within months. He died on 29 July 1936 at ninety-four, and the city of Buffalo turned out for the funeral in numbers the police could not count. Benedict XVI declared him Venerable on 14 January 2011.