DUBUQUE, Iowa (AP) — A private eastern Iowa college has announced it will remove a statue of the school’s founder after officials there learned new details about his slave-owning past. The Telegraph Herald reports that Loras College will remove the statue of Bishop Mathias Loras from the Dubuque campus and place it in storage. Loras, the first Roman Catholic bishop of Dubuque, established the seminary in 1839 that would eventually become Loras College.

Loras College President Jim Collins says school officials recently learned from a researcher that Loras bought an enslaved woman named Marie Louise while he was living in Mobile, Alabama, in 1836 and kept her as his slave until 1852, and hired her out to collect proceeds for various Iowa ministries.