Hundreds of ancient limestone blocks lay neatly arranged and organized by shape—like puzzle pieces on a card table—in barns that were once used by California Gov. Leland Stanford to make brandy. Nearly 900 years ago, these stones formed the “chapter house” at the Abbey of Santa Maria de Ovila, a Spanish Cistercian monastery about 90 miles northeast of Madrid.

Now the white and ochre chapter house stones, which have been designated as a historical landmark by the Tehama County Board of Supervisors, are being reconstructed at another Cistercian monastery–the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina.

It is a story of hope, frustration and dedication.

“I saw the stones the first day I arrived in California,” said Trappist Father Thomas Davis, abbot of the Abbey of New Clairvaux. “It was Sept. 15, 1955. I had just arrived from the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky, and the father superior here was driving us up to Vina.

“We took a quick tour through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and he pointed out the stones in crates under eucalyptus trees behind the tea gardens. I made a mental note that these stones were from a Cistercian monastery–and our order is the Cistercian order.”

Why were hundreds of limestone blocks from a 13th century monastery sitting in crates in Golden Gate Park?

They were part of a dream conceived by the late William Randolph Hearst that never became a reality.

In 1931, Hearst planned to build a private castle at his mother’s summer residence at Wyntoon, on the McCloud River near Mount Shasta. It was to be a single large building with towers and turrets, built around a central courtyard.

Hearst had purchased parts of the monastery—including the entire chapter house, which he intended to use as a foyer—to be used in the castle.

But financial problems brought on by the Depression halted those plans, so Hearst donated the stones to the city of San Francisco. They were moved from storage in the city’s largest warehouse to their new home outdoors where, by the 1970s, they had gone from being neatly stacked to badly scattered.

“The stones had been vandalized, the crates were broken apart, there had been fires and a lot of stones had been stolen or

destroyed,” Father Davis said. “In 1978, park officials agreed to let us have about 20 stones—kind of like relics. We hauled them up here in our abbey truck, and used one of them in our bell tower.”

In the late 1980s, Father Davis contacted park officials again and requested the stones from the chapter house.

“It was an on-again, off-again process,” he said. “I’d get interested, and they’d get interested, then I’d forget about it and get involved with other things. But some Cistercian scholars urged me not to let it drop, so I kept trying.”

In 1994 all those efforts came to fruition when the city of San Francisco finally agreed to give the chapter house stones to the abbey.

According to Trappist Brother Francis Flaherty, a chapter house is “where one of the monks reads a chapter from the Rule of St. Benedict which translates the Gospel into our way of life. It is also where we have religious ceremonies and community meetings.”

When the chapter house is completed, it will again be used for its original purpose. It will also be open to the public.

Unadorned stones, clean lines, natural light and a lack of ornamentation are the hallmarks of Cistercian Gothic architecture, a style that is used to express a contemplative approach to prayer and the sacred.

“This style is really about God. It is about expressing divine union,” said Patrick Cole, principal architect with Arcademe, an architectural firm in Chico that has been hired to bring the ancient structure up to California’s stringent earthquake safety codes.

“We have measured and tested every stone, and put all that information in a computer,” said Oskar Kempf, master stonemason, who has been commissioned to rebuild the chapter house with his assistant, Ross Leuthard. “The vaulting, portals, wall arches—every stone—are represented in the computer model, so I have a three-dimensional image to visualize how it will look before we put it together.”

He also has a $31,000 carving saw from England that cuts through the stones like butter.

“The original stonemasons used chisels, and the chisel was progressive,” he said. “They also used wheelbarrows, which were a very high-tech tool at the time. If they could see me, they would say, ‘You’re doing this right.’”

But the project has not gone completely high tech. Every stone was originally carved by hand, and every stone will now be finished by hand. “The last quarter inch will have a comb finish done with a nail brush that I made,” Kempf said.

Kempf estimates that about two-thirds of the chapter house will be rebuilt with original stones. New limestone blocks need to be purchased and carved for the rest of the building.

It took the original stonemasons 30 years–from 1190 to 1220—to build the chapter house. Father Davis hopes it will be rebuilt within two years, but it’s a dream that depends on funding.

“I had to have the support of the community before we accepted the stones for the chapter house,” he noted. “We agreed that we had to use funding from donations for this project. We don’t have that kind of financial resource.”

Under the direction of Sandy Goulart, campaign coordinator of the “Sacred Stones” project, and fund-raising consultant Annette Lomont, the monastery has already raised nearly half of the $4 million that will be needed to complete rebuilding the chapter house.

“We think this is really a California project,” said Goulart, who has coordinated a series of fund-raising receptions from Red Bluff to Los Angeles. “It is so rich historically, spiritually and architecturally. When it is completed, the chapter house will be the oldest freestanding building west of New York.”

The ultimate goal is to raise $14 million to construct an entire complex—including a church, small chapel, cloister, library, reception area and offices—in the same Cistercian Gothic style.

“I like to give the analogy that when we go out into the High Sierra, or parks, or the woods or hills, we commune with the divine,” Father Davis said. “Cistercian architecture has carved that experience in stone.”

Donations to the “Sacred Stones” project may be sent to: Sacred Stones, Abbey of New Clairvaux, P.O. Box 80, Vina, CA 96092. To arrange a tour of the project, call Sandy Goulart at (530) 839-2243. Web site: www.sacredstones.org.

Copyright © 2001 Diocese of Sacramento - All Rights Reserved

[Catholic Herald - Cover Page]