As I begin my final year here at the Rover, I would like to dedicate this particular article to the Lindsley family, with a discussion of an architectural assemblage in their own backyard of Belmont, North Carolina. My brother is entering his sophomore year at Belmont Abbey College, a small, Catholic college a short distance west of Charlotte.
It is of particular interest to me because I am planning to design a new library for the campus as my thesis project. In preparation for this, I have visited the college twice and met with administrators and staff. I also had the privilege of meeting Abbot Placid of the college’s namesake monastery.
This monastery, founded by Benedictines sent from St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania in 1876, is extremely important to the history of Catholicism in North Carolina. By the abbot’s estimate, there were perhaps only 800 lay Catholics inhabiting the state when the first monks arrived, a state of affairs which dominated the abbey’s early educational and missionary development. In fact, until the establishment of the Diocese of Raleigh in 1928, the abbots served as apostolic vicars and local ordinaries to the entire state. The Diocese of Charlotte was not created until 1971, and final suppression of the abbey’s territorial authority occurred in 1977, over a century after its foundation.
As a result, the abbey and its mother church, the Basilica of Our Lady Mary Help of Christians, are physical artifacts of the Church’s nascence in North Carolina. The basilica was built in the 1890’s according to a design by Detroit architect Peter Dederichs.
Born in Germany, Dederichs designed many churches in a German Gothic Revival style. As many of the early Benedictines in the United States were German, it makes sense that he would have done this project, even though it was far removed geographically from his practice. He is alleged to have designed several churches here in Indiana as well. The stained-glass windows were executed by the renowned workshop of Franz Mayer in Munich.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Abbey was enjoying modest success and the college was gaining academic prominence. In February of 1900, it attracted Joseph Vincent McInerney, a young architect who intended to study the classics to refine his work. The son of a stone-contractor and born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, he had been apprenticed to an architect in Pittsburgh and pursued studies at the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost (now Duquesne University).
Just four months after he arrived, however, Belmont Abbey was ravished by a devastating fire. Like Notre Dame’s fire decades before, it spared their Basilica, but left the school in ruins. Over the next few years, as he labored to rebuild, McInerney found his vocation as a priest-architect. Taking the name Michael, he entered the monastery as a novice in 1902 and was ordained in 1907.
His prolific career would span 60 years and see the construction of 220 churches throughout the eastern United States. In his early work, he continued the German Gothic Revival and made it his own, epitomizing the style known as “American Benedictine.” His mastery of this idiom is showcased in St. Leo Hall at Belmont Abbey College, built in 1906. He continued to design for the abbey and its college until his death in 1963. One of his final designs was in fact the 1957 library which my thesis proposes to supersede. The current scheme preserves this existing library building under an adaptive reuse.
In light of such outstanding heritage, I am hoping that my one-quarter-German ancestry and Pennsylvania upbringing will serve me well as I attempt to produce an “American Benedictine Revival” design for the new library. The college sees this project as the cornerstone of their future development strategy and a crucial tool in making the history and legacy of the Benedictines in North Carolina more accessible to scholars and the public.
Matthew Balkey is a fifth-year architecture student. He can be reached at mbalkey@nd.edu. For those interested in further reading on the subject, the Belmont Abbey Archives published a small booklet entitled “The Art of Mic
