The Catholic Benedictine Order dates to the late 5^th century A.D. Called upon by New Orleans Archbishop Francis Janssens to found a seminary capable of supporting the development of a clergy native to the region, the Benedictines established St. Joseph Preparatory Seminary in 1891. The institution’s initial site near Pontchatoula eventually proved to be unsatisfactory, so St. Joseph relocated in 1902 to a 1,200-acre tract near Covington, LA. Located on the Northshore, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, St. Joseph remains there to this day.

The earliest surviving buildings on the campus date to 1909, when a large, three-story monastery/seminary and a detached one-story refectory (dining hall) were completed to a design by Benedictine Father Gregory Uhlenbrock, who had trained as an architect in his native Germany. New Orleans architect Theodore Brune designed the Romanesque-style abbey church, completed in 1932; stunning interior murals were added in the late 1940s to these historic buildings, executed by Benedictine Father Gregory DeWit, with the assistance of Swiss native Milo Piuz.

The continued growth of the seminary in the postwar period prompted the construction of an entirely new complex, a multi-building Miesian effort designed by the New Orleans architecture firm Lawrence and Saunders and inaugurated in 1960. The firm also designed a retreat house for laypersons, completed in 1964. In 1969 the seminary received accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges & Schools, and St. Joseph Abbey and Seminary College came into being.

On the night of March 11, 2016, St. Joseph’s fine campus was inundated by over two feet of floodwaters when the Bogue Falaya River overflowed its banks, flooding fourteen buildings. In the wake of this disaster, Crescent Growth Capital was hired to pursue Louisiana Historic Tax Credits on behalf of the abbey.

Over the next nine years, Crescent deployed both in-house historic preservation consulting and tax credit monetization capabilities to subsidize the rehabilitation of seven of the nine principal buildings on campus, including pre-World War II examples (monastery, refectory, abbey church) and Midcentury Modern designs (Benet, Savio and Vianney Halls, Retreat House).

Upon its accomplishing, in February 2025, the fourth tax credit monetization and delivery of sale proceeds to St. Joseph, Crescent had successfully leveraged over $28 million of Qualified Rehabilitation Expenditures to generate nearly $5.7 million in tax-free sale proceeds for St. Joseph Abbey and Seminary College.