"And so we are going to establish a school for the service of the Lord." Saint Benedict's Rule for Monasteries Prologue
The Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Cross was born out of fire. When the monastery of Our Lady of the Valley in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, tragically and spectacularly burned to the ground on the night of March 21, 1950, the monks of the abbey were left without a home.
While the abbot of Our Lady of the Valley, Dom Edmund Futterer, labored to re-establish his displaced community at a new site at Spencer, Massachusetts, plans developed for a new foundation. Land was found in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, bordered by the famous river, shadowed by the Blue Ridge Mountains – a place of beauty and peace.
Monastic life at Our Lady of the Holy Cross began on November 18, 1950, eight months after the devastating fire in Rhode Island. Our new home was originally surveyed by George Washington, who urged a good friend of his, an Englishman named Ralph Wormeley, to settle on the land. On a hill north of a natural spring the Wormeley family erected a fieldstone house as a hunting lodge for a large home farther down the river. That stone house, built in 1784, is today the centerpiece of the monastery.
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