Monastery of Our Lady of Jordan, Oregon
The Monastery of Our Lady of Jordan was a Strict Observance Cistercian (Trappist) monastery in the community of Jordan in Linn County, Oregon, United States, founded in 1904 and lasting for about six years.
In 1904, Cistercian monks were forced to abandon the Fontgombault Abbey in Indre, France, after a 1901 secularist-driven French law had given the government control over non-profit associations and threatened the existence of monasteries.
In late summer and fall of 1904, under the direction of their abbot, Dom Fortunat Marchand, six Trappist monks from Fontgombault arrived in Oregon and bought about 400 acres (1.6 km2) of land near Jordan on which to build a monastery. Half of the acreage was cultivated farmland and the rest was woodland and brush. On a tributary of the Santiam River that formed the southern boundary of their property, they built a steam sawmill. There the Douglas-fir timber was converted into lumber for the use of the community and to sell. The monks also grew a variety of produce, including cereal crops, vegetables, pears, plums, and apples. One of the brothers won prizes at the Linn County Fair for his vegetables. In 1905, a dozen more men arrived. Over the next six years, as many as 35 American men tried to join the monks but they "found conditions too primitive or precarious, and all but one abandoned the idea".
The monastery was dedicated in 1907 by the Archbishop of Oregon City, Alexander Christie. The Right Rev. Father Thomas Aq. Meienhofer, Abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Mount Angel, preached the dedicatory sermon, in which he explained the nature and the object of the life of the Cistercians, or Trappists.
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