75 years later: Remembering my Tin Can Abbey

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

I have a strange and nostalgic affection for Quonset huts. 

My odd architectural ardor for the prefab semi-circular metal structures that housed World War II airplanes and soldiers started when a much younger me first visited one of the most unusual monasteries in the world, located right here in Utah.

In July 1947, three dozen monks traveled by train from the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to start a new Trappist foundation on an isolated 1800-acre mountain valley ranch in Huntsville. At first, they lived in surplus wooden barracks that had housed German and Italian prisoners of war near Ogden.

The Trappists wanted to build a permanent and more traditional European abbey from sandstone quarried from their new property, but that would take time. They needed a temporary structure, something that could bridge the gap between barrack and baroque.

Famous Kentucky monk/writer Thomas Merton—who I think wanted to come to Utah too—chronicled all this in an August 1947 Commonweal magazine article called “The Trappists Go to Utah.” 

Merton wrote, “A temporary monastery is already under construction. It will be made of metal ‘quonset huts,’ but will be one of the most elaborate ‘quonset’ structures that that has ever been attempted.”

Merton was not the only person intrigued by the Utah project. In late 1947 and early 1948, dozens of newspapers across the United States carried a short wire story from United Press (UP) reporting on the Trappist building effort and calling it “the first monastery constructed of Quonset huts.”

The monks hired some impressive local experts to help them. 

Their Salt Lake City architects—Raymond Ashton and Raymond Evans (today the firm they started is 100 years old and known as MHTN Architects)—had designed the Utah state prison and several buildings on the University of Utah campus, including the iconic yellow brick field house.

Ashton was a former president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Both Ashton and Evans were Latter-day Saints. 

In retirement, Ashton said the Huntsville monastery was one of his favorite projects. He told the Davis News Journal in August 1958 that he put “the feel and heart” the monks sought into the building, even though it was a temporary structure.

The monks’ construction firm, George A. Whitmeyer & Sons from Ogden, was prominent too. Whitmeyer’s firm built the U of U field house, as well as two of the loveliest Art Deco style buildings in Northern Utah—Ogden High School and the Ogden/Weber Municipal Building.

These architects and builders toiled for about 14 months, and the monks finally moved into their new Quonset hut monastery seventy-five years ago, in the Fall of 1948. 

Soon after, the first Huntsville Trappist abbot, Father Maurice Lans, told a local newspaper that although funds must be secured, “architectural plans are ready” and he “would like to start” building the new grand stone edifice soon.

It was not meant to be. 

Funds were not secured. The post-World War II monastic boom—large numbers of men joining monasteries in the late 1940s and early 1950s—slowed down to a trickle a few years later. 

In the mid-1960s, the Utah monks announced that because of changes occurring in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), they had postponed plans to construct the new stone building.

All that set the stage for the early 1970s, when I started to visit the abbey as a young boy with my family. Spending many days and hours there, I bonded not only with the monks, but I also fell in love with the unique Quonset hut structure.

It was an important backdrop for the next decade of my life, a story told in my August 2021 book Monastery Mornings. As a result, I was thrilled when the artists at Paraclete Press included part of the building on my book cover.

I was not the only one to fall in love with the unusual architecture. Two of the Utah monks now in Heaven, my friends Father Patrick Boyle and Father Alan Hohl, told me that the simple and distinct Quonset drew them to the Ogden Valley abbey. 

Like me, many visitors, local Huntsville residents, and others came to associate the word “Quonset” with the word “monk.”

In February 1992, popular Salt Lake Tribune architecture columnist Jack Goodman visited, sketched, and wrote about the building. He said no abbey in history “was as strange in concept and design as the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity.” 

Goodman speculated that the monks had shelved plans for another monastery because they “realized the original quonset shapes lent a unique look to the whole monastic religious community.”

Maybe, but in the early 2000s, the monks designed and tried to fund a new monastery building. Abbot Casimir Bernas said the “utilitarian” Quonset structure was only intended to last a decade or two, and in the new millennium hindered efforts to recruit new monks.

Some of his fellow Trappists agreed and, despite their love for the place, acknowledged it suffered from defects, such as being heated in the summer and air-conditioned in the winter. 

Pointing to his aging fellow monks as part of his case for the new proposed building, Father Casimir told one newspaper, “It’s now or never.” He was right, but only about the “never” part.

In 2016, the remaining Utah monks, most of them in their 80s and 90s, sold their property to their good friend and neighbor, a water lawyer named Bill White. A year later, they all retired to a Salt Lake City assisted living facility. 

Bill and his wife Alane preserved the Trappists’ farm with a conservation easement.

They hired the McFarlands—Latter-day Saint seventh generation family farmers from West Weber—to work the land. Among other things, the McFarlands now grow wonderful pumpkins on fields named after Catholic saints.

Bill also saved many of the monks’ barns and their cemetery. And he made Herculean efforts to save the old monastery building too.

The upkeep costs on the deteriorating Quonset hut building were enormous. Bill constantly had to chase vandals and rodents away from the unoccupied 58,000 square foot site. 

Conditioned on their agreement to restore it, Bill offered to give the structure and nearby acres—without charge—to several educational, religious, and preservation groups. None could afford the baseline $12 million tab to bring the building up to code.

In 2019, Bill made the gut-wrenching decision to tear it down, landscape the area, and eventually replace it with a smaller chapel or open pavilion to honor the monks. He made the right decision. 

Before demolition day, Bill let me walk through the place several times, and salvage anything I wanted, including the choir benches the monks sat on. Those were bittersweet days, but perhaps they were inevitable, given what it is that monks do and believe.

Some folks called the Utah abbey the “Tin Can Monastery.” Perhaps intended as an insult, I kind of like the monastic moniker. It captures the monks’ simple, down-to-earth nature. Winston Churchill once wrote that, “We shape our buildings and then they shape us.”

The nickname also reveals the monks’ uncanny ability to turn something mundane into something marvelous, and their minimalist other-worldly focus. Bill White calls the “temporary” Quonset hut abbey that lasted 70 years a testament to the genius and resourcefulness of those men. 

In the years since its demolition, I have noticed that although my Tin Can Abbey is gone, the remarkable spirit that built it, and made it the most unique monastery in the world, still lives on there, as if the monks left an imprint on the land.

Whenever I start to miss the old Quonset hut building, which is often, the words of the last Utah Trappist leader comfort me. In 2017, Father Brendan Freeman wrote in Cistercian Studies Quarterly about the final days of the abbey. 

He concluded, “It comes down to this: no matter where we are on this earth we have no permanent dwelling. Our true homeland is not here: our true monastery is not a building or a visible place. It is in the heart—a space that can never be diminished or demolished. It is eternal and everlasting as the heavens.”

(A version of this article was published in The Salt Lake Tribune on September 24, 2023.)

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.