My Tin Can Abbey

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

A profound surprise from six decades of life is my unusual affection for Quonset huts. This strange architectural ardor is not derived from the prefab semi-circular metal structures that housed World War II airplanes and soldiers. Instead, my attachment started when a much younger me first visited one of the most unusual monasteries in the world.

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

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

Famous Kentucky monk/writer Thomas Merton, who may have wanted to go 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 United Press (UP) story reporting 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 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), and both men were Latter-day Saints. Yet, in retirement Ashton said the Huntsville monastery was one of his favorite projects. He told the Davis County Clipper 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, was based in nearby Ogden and 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—the Ogden High School and the Ogden/Weber Municipal Building.

These architects and builders toiled for about 14 months, and the monks finally moved into the Quonset hut monastery 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 not only bonded with the monks, 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 (see My cover story, co-starring Thomas Merton).

I was not the only one to fall for the unusual architecture. Two of the Utah monks, 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.” He 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.”

That may well be true, 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 monks, most of them in their 80s and 90s, sold their property to their good friend and neighbor Bill White and retired to a Salt Lake City assisted living facility. Afterwards, Bill made Herculean efforts to save the old monastery building, just like he has preserved the Trappists’ farm (with a conservation easement), many of their barns, and their cemetery.

The upkeep costs on the old Quonset hut building were enormous, and 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 a number of 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 to honor the monks. Bill made the right decision. Before demolition day, he let me walk through the place several times, and salvage anything I wanted (see: Sustainable Brother Stanislaus).

Those were bittersweet days, but perhaps they were inevitable, especially given what it is that monks do and what it is that monks believe.

Some folks had called the Utah abbey the “Tin Can Monastery.” Perhaps they intended the nickname as an insult, but I kind of like it. The monastic moniker captures the monks’ simple, down-to-earth nature, their 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 (see Unexpected Vespers).

Whenever I start to miss the old Quonset hut building, which is often, the words of the last Utah Trappist leader comfort me. Father Brendan Freeman wrote in Cistercian Studies Quarterly (“To Close a Monastery,” 52.2, 2017) 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.”

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.