By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Nearly a decade after Northern Utah’s beloved Trappist monastery—Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville—closed in 2017, there’s only one monk from there still living in Utah.
One other long-time Utah monk, however, resides in a monastery in upstate New York. I was delighted to visit him in August 2025.
A great great grandson of Brigham Young, Brother David Baumbach was born in Riverside, California in 1947. After a few years in the United States Air Force, he joined the Huntsville monastery in 1973 and took final vows in 1979 as “Brother Lawrence,” when I was just a teenager.
We watched with great interest when David committed himself to the monastic life. In Monastery Mornings, my 2021 book about growing up at the abbey, I describe the touching ceremony where David took vows of obedience, stability, poverty, celibacy, and conversion of manners.
Unfortunately, I did not get to see David often enough afterwards. I went off to college out of state and then was busy with law school, with a legal career that started in 1986, with marriage in 1989, fatherhood in 1991, and so on.
My family and I visited Huntsville for the monastery’s 50th anniversary party in 1997 and had a nice conversation with David, but then we lost touch again.
Of course, Brother David (he eventually reclaimed his birth name) was very busy during those years too.
He once told a newspaper reporter, “When [the Utah Abbey] first got started, we were a very young community and experimented with all kinds of different products.” This included ranching, farming, and a prize-winning dairy, but when milk prices dropped in the mid-1980s, the monks decided to close the dairy and make up the income by selling honey.
An innovative Utah monk named Father Bartholomew had started the honey business a few years earlier with hives located right on the abbey grounds. The monks asked another skilled and hardworking monk—Brother David—to take the honey business to the next level.
He was wildly successful. The monks had a booming mail order business, and for a time, Trappist Creamed Honey made in Utah was on the shelves of the national retailer Safeway Stores.
Brother David, however, has always first and foremost been a monk rather than an entrepreneur. When the honey business started to interfere with that monastic life in 2008—too few monks to do a lot of work—the Trappists began to phase it out.
Afterwards, Father Patrick Boyle from the monastery bookstore often told disappointed visitors who wanted to buy honey, “We did not run out of bees, we ran out of monks!” Brother David explained that financial success was not worth the cost.
In 2008 he told an Associated Press reporter, “We were selling so much honey we couldn’t keep up with it, and I realized we were becoming a three-ring circus. I said, ‘Stop right there. We’re here to serve God, not the Almighty dollar.’”
He said he wanted the pressure off the monastery and to “get our priorities right.” He did just that.
David was such a devoted monk that when the monastery’s last abbot—Father David Altman—was elected leader, he chose David as his prior, or second in command.
About a dozen years into the new millennium, it became clear that Holy Trinity Abbey was going to close. The average age of the monks was over 80, and no new monks had joined and stayed at the monastery since the 1980s.
In 2015, still in his late 60s, David chose to move to a more vibrant Trappist community—the Abbey of the Genesee near Buffalo, New York. Longtime Utah Brother Cyril Anderson moved with him and they made final vows of stability together at their new monastery in 2016.
Brother Cyril, a survivor of the WWII Battle of Iwo Jima, died in 2018. Genesee Abbey noted that despite his prolonged illness, Cyril maintained his “cherubic smile” and gentle and cheerful self to the end.
Brother David now is the last Utah monk standing outside of Utah. During the last decade we exchanged a few letters, but I was very happy when my wife Vicki and I were able to visit him at Genesee Abbey in August 2025.
It was a joyous family reunion, and a poignant reminder that the friendships I made as a boy with the Huntsville monks are lifelong gifts. We picked up right where we had left off, and there was a lot to discuss!
Now close to age 80, David has thrived at his new monastic home. Like anyone with his mileage, he deals with some health issues and he cannot kneel after a recent knee replacement surgery. (“Imagine a monk who never kneels,” he told me with a smile.)
Yet, he scurries around the lovely abbey grounds with the energy of a man a decade or two younger and handles what, by my informal count, seems to me to be at least a dozen different jobs. Still, he told us that the move there also has allowed him to step back and to be the simple monk he always wanted to be.
Although I miss him, as well as the Northern Utah Quonset hut abbey where he started that journey and began writing that story, I could not have hoped or prayed for any better final chapters for my old friend than the ones he now composes on the gentle banks of the Genesee River in Western New York.
*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. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
