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History is again rising out of the ridge in Logan County.
From this wallowing swale on the northern hips of the ridge, one looks across the expanse to see the Subiaco Abbey perched high above the farmland, its reddish tile roof sharp against the sky. But it is from this spot, south across the highway and up the rutted, pitched incline of pasture and muddy paths, the sketchy foundational footprints of the community’s origins are being carefully, lovingly brought back into the sun for the first time in a generation.
“It’s very powerful to see this,” said Abbot Jerome Kodell, OSB. “To finally begin to see what was here before us, it’s exciting.”
The newly cleared foundations represent the culmination of an enduring mystery surrounding the history of the 136-year-old Benedictine community, which marked the arrival of its three founding monks from Switzerland March 15.
While it is well-documented that the original abbey, and later a school and house for the resident nuns who followed, stood on this patch of land, archaeological evidence of the secondary structures was elusive.
“I can remember watching them bulldoze the area where the old abbey was,” said Father Hugh Assenmacher, OSB, the community’s historian. The original abbey burned to the ground in December 1901 after a fire in the detached kitchen building spread to the wooden structure; decades later bulldozers razed the foundations to transform the site to pasture.
“We knew these other buildings were here, we just couldn’t figure out where they stood,” Father Assenmacher said.
Today’s monks regularly visit the site of the original mountaintop chapel, often with current students of Subiaco Academy, to help the boys connect with the generations that came before them. In October, that heritage is driven home with a Mass and talk on the site of the old abbey, followed by the annual pig roast.
“Most guys who went to school here, unless they’re just absolutely not interested, are familiar with this area here,” Father Assenmacher said.
Little did they know that for all the hints of the previous community they could see — the terracing in the hillside where the vineyards once grew; the hand-cut stone cistern — a bigger prize was right under their noses.
“We just assumed that erosion and time had taken everything,” Abbot Kodell said. “Turned out we were just looking in the wrong place.”
It was a couple of months ago Father Assenmacher was poring over some books in the abbey archives when a photograph fell out that would settle it once and for all. Apparently shot from the second floor of the abbey, the photo showed the configuration of buildings farther west on the site than originally believed.
Armed with this new guide, the monks essentially walked right up to the site of the nuns’ house then quickly found the site of the school. The discoveries have caught the imagination of the monks and students.
“Some (students) are very interested in it now,” said Abbot Kodell. “They were up here last weekend and apparently got excited about seeing those stone walls and everything. Some of them said, ‘We found an ancient wall!’”
Though hidden no longer, the mountain would not surrender her prizes without a fight. The ruins, marked by large, hand-cut and fitted stones of the buildings’ foundation, were heavily guarded by a particularly nasty bramble of vines studded with 2- to 3-inch thorns. Cutting through that natural razor-ribbon, one can clearly make out the footprint of the buildings’ layout, but it is not a chore to be envied.
“Whoever introduced that stuff up here,” Father Assenmacher said, “ought to be shot.”
With some excavation of the sites ongoing, including digging out an old well, there’s still plenty of work left to do. Abbot Kodell said he’d like the community to continue to develop the site in order to bring this Catholic and Arkansas history to a wider audience.
“It’s like finding arrowheads in a way,” Abbot Kodell said. “All of a sudden, you’re in a different era.”
