St. Bonaventure's College (commonly called St. Bon's) is an independent kindergarten to grade 12 Catholic School in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. It is located in the St. John's Ecclesiastical District, adjacent to the Roman Catholic Basilica of St. John the Baptist. The school is named in honour of one of the Doctors of the Catholic Church, St. Bonaventure. Early History In 1855, there was a public auction to sell more than 30,000 building stones from Waterford, Ireland, which had been imported to build the local penitentiary. The Catholic Bishop of the day, Right Rev. John Thomas Mullock, took advantage of plans to build a smaller penal institution and purchased sufficient surplus stones to construct a Franciscan monastery. In April 1857 the bishop laid the cornerstone of the college named after the Franciscan Order's most scholarly and famous theologian, St. Bonaventure. A year later, in March 1858, the new facilities opened. Dormitories were installed upstairs as the institution operated as a seminary. Seven years later in 1865 the college began to admit secular students and, in 1889, the Irish Christian Brothers assumed administrative responsibilities for the school. The college remains significant in the history of the Irish language in Newfoundland as, during the Gaelic revival, the sixth President of St. Bonaventure's College was not only a member of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, but also taught classes in the Irish-language there during the 1870s. Although the subject still remains to be explored, Kenneth E. Nilsen, an American linguist specializing in the Celtic languages, has argued in a posthumously published essay that "closer inspection would likely reveal a Canadian counterpart to the American language revival movement." Mullock Hall was designated as a Registered Heritage Structure on May 15, 1989, by the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador and is listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places. Holland Hall One of the more modern buildings on the campus is Holland Hall, which sits on the site of the school's former tennis courts (built 1931) which were previously Brother Strapp's "Cricket and Football Crease," affectionately known as "Bartie's Pitch." Holland Hall is a three-storey institutional building, construction on which began in 1957. The building was designed by Frank Noseworthy, while working for architect Frederick A. Colbourne, and is constructed of cast-in-place concrete with large areas of glass block The building of the school was overseen by Brother