By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
After the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Northern Utah befriended me when I was a boy in the early 1970s, I enjoyed the fruits of their labors. In the Spring of 2024, I got an unexpected peek at some of those labors too.
It took a lot of work to create that beautiful abbey. I saw just how much when a woman named Corrie Fiedler arranged for me to see the original monastery blueprints at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library.
I had met Corrie while we both were studying the history of the Huntsville abbey’s buildings. I was trying to learn more about the setting of my 2021 Monastery Mornings memoir.
Corrie was preserving some family history. Her grandfather Raymond Evans helped plan, design, and construct the monastery buildings some 80 years ago.
Corrie has created a website documenting much of the work of Evans’ Salt Lake City architectural firm, then called Ashton Evans & Brazier (AE&B). The Trappists consulted AE&B about three sets of monastic buildings: (1) temporary barracks; (2) a Quonset hut abbey intended as temporary; and (3) a permanent stone edifice.
Why did they pick AE&B? It’s not clear from the firm’s old files that I reviewed.
It may be because, as Corrie’s website shows, the firm had a lot of experience building houses of worship. Most were for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the firm completed projects for Utah’s Protestant and Jewish communities too.
The key factor, however, may have been AE&B’s work designing the St. Joseph’s Church Parish Rectory in Ogden. That work was done about the same time as the drawings for the nearby Huntsville monastery.
Ogden priests took the laboring oar in getting the Trappists to Utah and helping them once here. My guess is those priests also referred the monks to AE&B.
The Trappists arrived in Utah on July 10, 1947. They left their original monastic home—Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky—because it overflowed with men after World War II ended and after Thomas Merton published The Seven Storey Mountain about his life at Gethsemani.
The AE&B architects were hard at work, however, long before the pioneer monks even got to Utah. Several of the collected prints and drawings I saw are dated as of the Spring of 1947, meaning AE&B likely started preparing them much earlier that year or even in 1946.
Some of the new gems of information I learned from the old AE&B monastery files were about the surplus wooden POW barracks the Utah monks lived in at first.
The well-known and beloved Quonset hut abbey was not ready when the monks arrived in Huntsville, so they needed temporary quarters. In June 1947, the Ogden Standard-Examiner newspaper reported that wooden buildings previously used to house WWII prisoners of war had been hauled to the site.
Until I saw the AE&B drawings, however, I never knew exactly how the monks had configured the barracks they called home for over a year. The drawings reveal that the Trappists used a three-winged “T” structure, attaching three long 100’ x 20’ structures together.
The AE&B floor plans indicate one full wing served as a dormitory (with mattresses on the floor in one old photo I’ve seen). Another wing—the trunk/base of the “T” structure—was for other necessary living space (e.g., kitchen, refectory, common room, guest parlor, etc.)
An entire third wing was devoted to the monks’ first Utah chapel, a fitting use of so much space by men of prayer. The architects even found a way to include a small steeple, and what looks like a little bell tower, on the barracks-chapel.
The drawings indicate the architects used stoves to heat each wing, but they must not have worked well. Merton’s 1949 history of the Cistercian order, The Waters of Siloe, includes an amusing story about the monks’ initial exposure to the harsh Ogden Valley winter weather:
“One young monk, a lover of sleep and warmth, established himself in the hut which had been allotted to the little chicks and was kept at a constant temperature of eighty degrees.” Now, that’s a monk after my own heart.
By the Fall of 1948, the Utah monks were able to move out of the barracks and into the Quonset hut abbey building they called home for the next 70 years. The AE&B files have dozens of drawings, blueprints, and details on this project, which they call the “Temporary Main Building.”
The drawings reveal: intricate floor plans; specs for the heating, plumbing, and electrical systems; structural details for the bell tower; requirements for the gatehouse in front of the abbey; door/window sizes; and even the designation of a very large basement space for a wine cellar.
There also are lovely pencil sketches of the planned entire finished product. One of those architectural portraits was colorized by a well-known Chicago postcard company, and printed onto linen postcards. The abbey was selling them about a year later.
The building intrigued Thomas Merton, who I think wanted to come to Utah too. In an August 1947 Commonweal magazine article called “The Trappists Go to Utah,” he 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 interested in 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.”
My favorite part of the AE&B Quonset hut abbey drawings is the simple but eye-catching image of a tall thin monk that appears in several sketches. Among other places, the architects show him climbing the steps to the chapel and standing on a balcony inside.
Probably used for perspective, the lanky sketch-monk wears a fashionable cape and sports what looks like a galero, a broad-rimmed hat commonly worn by Catholic clergy many years ago.
The monks I knew did wear white robes, but never the hat. Maybe they should have…the AE&B sketch-monk looks very cool.
Because the Quonset hut was only supposed to be a temporary monastery, a number of the AE&B drawings— beginning in the early 1950s—depict studies and visions for a new permanent abbey. This building, unfortunately, was never built.
I have written before about the grand edifice that the monastery leadership publicized in local newspapers as its planned permanent building. What I learned for the first time from the old AE&B files, however, is that apparently there was an “Option B” version that was quite beautiful too.
This new abbey was to be set facing west, like the Quonset hut building, but with a guest wing and public space shooting out to the north and west. Two lakes were to surround the new monastery.
This alternative design also is a bit more contemporary than the announced version. The bell tower (situated further west), the church’s flying buttresses, and many of the abbey roofs are curved to evoke the memory of the Quonset huts.
These 1952 sketches repeat my favorite element of the earlier drawings—monk images. One sketch shows nine monks in formal procession down a staircase and another depicts seven of them in prayer before a large courtyard crucifix.
These sketch-monks look more like Trappists. A hood replaces the galero hat and these monks wear robes instead of fashionable capes.
Still, the inclusion of the figures suggests a bit of fun and some whimsy. The images—and the artistic calligraphy on the main drawing labels—suggest that the AE&B architects were enjoying their work on these drawings
Raymond Evans’ partner Raymond Ashton has confirmed this impression. He told a Davis County newspaper in August 1958 that the Huntsville monastery was one of his favorite projects, and that AE&B tried to put “the feel and heart” the monks sought into the buildings and drawings.
Having now seen the fruits of AE&B’s labors—all the drawings as well as one of the buildings they designed—I think they succeeded.
*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.
