Their stone farmhouse was not yet ready for occupancy when Elizabeth and the sisters arrived in Emmitsburg, in June 1809. Reverend John Dubois, S.S., (1764-1842), founder of Mount Saint Mary's College and Seminary (1808), offered his cabin on Saint Mary's Mountain for the women to use until they would be able to move to their property in the nearby valley some six weeks later. According to tradition, Elizabeth named the area Saint Joseph's Valley. There the Sisters of Charity of Saint Joseph's began July 31, 1809 in the Stone House, the former Fleming farmhouse (c.1750). In mid-February, 1810, Elizabeth and her companions moved into Saint Joseph's House (now The White House). Elizabeth opened Saint Joseph's Free School in February 22, 1810 to needy girls of the area and thus the first free Catholic school for girls staffed by sisters in the country. Saint Joseph's Academy began May 14, 1810, with the addition of boarding students who paid tuition which enabled the Sisters of Charity to subsidize their charitable mission. Saint Joseph's Academy and Free School formed the cradle of Catholic education in the United States.
Divine Providence guided Elizabeth and her little community through the poverty and unsettling first years. Numerous women joined the Sisters of Charity. During the period 1809-1820, of the ninety-eight candidates who arrived in Elizabeth's lifetime, eighty-six of them actually joined the new community; seventy percent remained Sisters of Charity for life. Illness, sorrow, and early death were omnipresent in Elizabeth's life. She buried eighteen sisters at Emmitsburg, in addition to her two daughters Annina and Rebecca, and her sisters-in-law Harriet and Cecilia Seton.
The Sulpicians assisted Elizabeth in adapting the seventeenth-century French Common Rules of the Daughters of Charity (1672) for the Sisters of Charity of Saint Joseph's in accord with the needs of the Catholic Church in America. Elizabeth formed her sisters in the Vincentian spirit according to the tradition of Louise de Marillac (1591-1660) and Vincent de Paul (1581-1660). Eighteen Sisters of Charity, including Elizabeth, made private, annual vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and service of the poor for the first time, July 19, 1813; thereafter they made vows annually on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation.
Elected by the members of the community to be the first Mother of the Sisters of Charity, Elizabeth was reelected successively and remained at its head until her death. The Sulpicians, who had conceived and founded the community, filled the office of superior general through 1849. Elizabeth worked successively with three Sulpicians in this capacity: Rev. Louis William Dubourg, S.S., Rev. Jean-Baptiste David, S.S., (1761-1841) and Rev. John Dubois, S.S. (1764-1842).
The Sisters of Charity intertwined social ministry with education in the faith and religious values in all they undertook in their mission. Elizabeth dispatched sisters to Philadelphia to manage Saint Joseph's Asylum, the first Catholic orphanage in the United States in 1814. The next year she opened a mission at Mount Saint Mary's to oversee the infirmary and domestic services for the college and seminary near Emmitsburg. In 1817 sisters from Saint Joseph's Valley went to New York to begin the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum.
