Arkansas Institutions: Venerable Subiaco Academy

Editor’s note: This article, written by Rex Nelson, appears in the latest magazine edition of Talk Business Arkansas, which you can read here.

The complex rises suddenly and majestically from the surrounding countryside as you drive along Arkansas Highway 22 in Logan County.

Subiaco – consisting of a Benedictine abbey and an adjoining school for boys – is an Arkansas landmark.

Thousands of Arkansans have attended retreats at Subiaco through the years. Since the early 1960s, the Coury House has been the abbey’s retreat center. There are 36 overnight rooms, and the retreat center stays busy as people come to this pastoral setting near Paris to pray, reflect and learn.

To truly understand Subiaco, though, you need to visit with some of the monks in addition to some of the men who once attended school here.

The abbey’s historian, Father Hugh Assenmacher, is a good example of the people who devote their lives to this institution. He entered Subiaco Academy in the fall of 1947 as a ninth-grade student. The Billings, Mo., native graduated from high school in 1951, took one year of college courses at Subiaco, entered the abbey as a novice in the fall of 1952 and said his vows in September 1953. Through the years, he has taught religion, history, sociology and music. He was the abbey’s organist and was even the band director and choral master for a time. Like many of the monks, he has spent decades in the rural setting and served in multiple roles.

Assenmacher, now in his 80s, is retired from teaching at the academy, but still takes visitors on walking tours of the grounds. He has spent more than his fair share of time through the years cutting grass, raking leaves and trimming shrubs. He points out that the monks even wash their own dishes. He generally takes his turn at lunch. The Benedictines believe in a life of “prayer, community and work.”

A typical day for a Subiaco monk includes prayer at 5:45 a.m., mass at 6:35 a.m., breakfast at 7:15 a.m., noon prayer, lunch, readings at 5:30 p.m., supper at 6 p.m. and vespers at 7:05 p.m. Students from the academy are welcome to join the prayer services.

Asked if any of the boys show up for the 5:45 a.m. prayers, the soft-spoken Assenmacher replies: “Not often.”

There are almost 200 students at the academy, which serves boys from the seventh through the 12th grades. More than 30 of them are international students. Not all of the students are residents. Some commute from nearby communities. The academy even runs a bus to Fort Smith each day.

“Students who attend Subiaco Academy come from various backgrounds,” a school publication states. “Our young men become part of a family and make Subiaco home. Their ties to one another and to the monks remain long after graduation. Subiaco remains a permanent reminder of their formation throughout their life.”

Subiaco graduates include Arkansas business leaders such as Matt Post (class of 1943) of Altus and Leo Anhalt (class of 1958) of Fort Smith.

Post, who became president of Post Familie Winery in 1951, is a former Altus mayor and is well known by agriculture and tourism officials across the state.

Anhalt is the co-founder of SSI Inc., a construction company that was formed in 1969. He helped start the National Craft Olympics and has long been active in civic affairs in the Fort Smith area.

And then there’s former state Sen. Jay Bradford, who was the only non-Catholic graduate in the class of 1958. Bradford, who grew up at Paris, later founded First Arkansas Insurance at Pine Bluff. He went on to become one of the state’s most high-profile legislators, serving in both the House and Senate and playing a key role in the establishment of the state Ethics Commission. Bradford was appointed by Gov. Mike Beebe as the state insurance commissioner, a position he still holds.

“It instills in its students a value of learning and a dedication to community life that follows them throughout their lives,” Bradford says of the academy. “Subiaco is a college preparatory school whose graduates have attended most of the major universities, including the military service academies. Subiaco graduates live all over the world. They’re loyal alumni who continue to support the abbey both spiritually and financially.”

Bradford, who has always been outspoken, clearly is proud to be a Subiaco graduate.

“I credit luck for any success I’ve had, and one of the greatest strokes of luck I’ve ever had was being able to attend Subiaco Academy,” he says. “The values I was taught there have been a mainstay of my business career and my public service.”

Lured by the advertising campaign of an Arkansas railroad, German-speaking immigrants made their way into western Arkansas in the 1870s, establishing St. Benedict’s Colony.

Soon after the Civil War, the U.S. Congress had given the state of Arkansas 10 alternating sections of land on each side of a proposed railroad route to aid in the construction of what would become the Little Rock & Fort Smith Railroad. Legislation was passed allowing the issuance of state-backed bonds to finance railroad construction. That legislation allotted the land given by Congress to the railroad.

In 1869, a freight yard and depot were built in Argenta, which now is known as North Little Rock. By August of that year, workers were laying track. The spot where the Little Rock & Fort Smith Railroad tracks crossed the Cairo & Fulton Railroad tracks became known as the Fort Smith Crossing. It’s now the site of the massive Union Pacific rail yard at North Little Rock.

In 1870, workers laid 24 miles of track as they followed the north bank of the Arkansas River west toward Fort Smith. By 1871, 82 miles of track had been laid.

“An influx of skilled German immigrants in Arkansas allowed the Little Rock & Fort Smith to push across the state,” Larry LeMasters writes for the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “These immigrants worked for the railroad and settled on land grants given by the Little Rock & Fort Smith and in towns along the railway, eventually forming the basis for Arkansas’ wine industry near Altus.”

The railroad reached Van Buren on Jan. 30, 1879.

The railroad established a market for its services by selling land both north and south of the Arkansas River to immigrants. The Catholic Diocese of Little Rock acted as an agent for the railroad.

Bishop Edward Fitzgerald, a native of Limerick on the west coast of Ireland, had come to this country at age 15 when his family left Ireland during the great potato famine. He entered a seminary at Perryville, Mo., in 1849. Fitzgerald became a priest in 1857 at St. Patrick’s in Columbus, Ohio, and later became known across Ohio for having healed a schism between Irish and German immigrants.

Pope Pius IX appointed Fitzgerald as the second bishop of Little Rock in 1866. Three years later, during the First Vatican Council, Fitzgerald was one of just two prelates to vote against papal infallibility. Fitzgerald served as bishop until 1907, watching the diocese go from having six priests to having almost 50.

Fitzgerald played a leading role in encouraging immigration to Arkansas during the 1870s and 1880s. There weren’t many Irish immigrants, but Germans – both Catholic and Lutheran – poured into the state. The Catholics were fleeing the anti-Catholic policies of German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck.

In 1877, Abbot Martin Marty of St. Meinrad’s Abbey in southern Indiana decided to establish a Benedictine mission in western Arkansas. In December 1877, Father Isidor Hobi of St. Meinrad’s found a site near Paris for St. Benedict’s Colony. Father Wolfgang Schlumpf, Brother Hilarin Bentz and Brother Casper Hildesheim rode in a mule-drawn wagon from the abbey in Indiana to Arkansas during the spring of 1878. They celebrated the first recorded mass in Logan County on March 19 of that year. About 30 German families already had arrived at the colony. By the end of 1878, more than 150 families had settled in the area.

St. Meinrad’s was limited in the amount of financial support it could provide, but what had become known as St. Benedict’s Priory was helped by the Abbey Maria-Einsiedeln in Switzerland. Swiss monks were sent to Logan County to ensure that the Benedictine mission there would survive. In 1887, St. Benedict’s College opened. It was the forerunner of what is now Subiaco Academy.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII raised the status of St. Benedict’s Priory to that of an abbey. It was renamed Subiaco Abbey, and Bishop Fitzgerald began sending seminarians from the Diocese of Little Rock to be trained there. The seminarians were trained at Subiaco from 1892 until 1911.

The first monastery was destroyed by a massive fire in December 1901, but work already had begun on a new building on top of a hill. That hilltop remains the location of Subiaco Abbey and Academy, which began a high school for boys in 1902. By the 1920s, the German and Swiss influence on Subiaco was waning. English was spoken more often than German. Father Ignatius Conrad, a Swiss-German monk who had been elected the first Benedictine abbot in Arkansas in 1892, was replaced in 1925 by a native Arkansan, Father Edward Burgert.

Parts of Subiaco burned again in 1927. The Great Depression began two years later, and the abbey struggled to recover. By the 1950s and 1960s, though, Subiaco again was thriving. The abbey church, which had been destroyed in 1927, was rebuilt between 1953 and 1959. The 182 stained glass windows in the church were designed by the Franz Mayer Co. of Germany. The columns for what’s known as the high altar are 18 feet high. A canopy and cross of carved wood are covered with gold leaf. There are 52 tons of marble in the sanctuary. The white marble came from Italy while the red marble was imported from Spain.

The Coury House Retreat Center opened in 1963 and in the decades since has played host to visitors from across the country.

On the extensive grounds surrounding the abbey, the monks have raised cattle, kept vineyards, grown produce and even operated a sawmill at one time or another through the years. They still make what’s known as Monk Sauce, a pepper sauce that’s a popular item in the Subiaco gift shop.

The adjacent town of Subiaco, which had a population of 572 people in the 2010 census, has buildings along Conrad Street that were constructed by German immigrants from the same locally quarried stone that was used for the abbey. Eighty acres of abbey land was donated in the late 1800s to the Subiaco Development Co. for the town. Street names include Augustine, Pius, Meinrad and Boniface.

Conrad Elksen built a rail depot and mercantile store in the new town. On June 30, 1909, Subiaco residents celebrated the arrival of the first passenger train to stop there. The monastery band played. The abbot, dressed in full vestments, blessed the train, greeted the passengers and helped drive the final spike.

Passenger service ended in 1938. By 1949, the line had ceased operation entirely. The depot was torn down in 1961. But the town of Subiaco was not dependent on the railroad. Its fate was tied to the nearby abbey and academy, which continue to operate all these decades later, bringing boys from around the world to a remote place called Subiaco.