"A Little Place in the Country"

"A Little Place in the Country"

For decades the mother house in Newark had depended on St. Anselm as a house of post secondary studies for its young monks. In anticipation of the coming independence of St. Anselm.  Abbot Ernest had led the Newark community to consider s suitable location for a new house of studies. Two sites were considered, the Darlington estate in Mahwah, New Jersey and the Delbarton estate near Morristown.

There is no record of why the choice fell upon the latter, but oral tradition tells that the bishop of Newark, John J. O’Connor, wanted Darlington, and indeed it became the diocesan major seminary.  But a less pedestrian legend has it that the aged Father Ambrose Huebner, who had joined St. Mary’s almost at its birth and had been the first prior appointed by James Zilliox, preferred the Delbarton estate, while the majority of the community wanted the Mahwah location. He therefore sought supernatural intervention. On a trip to Morristown he planted Benedictine medals on the Delbarton estate in hopes that St. Benedict would guide the choice thither.

In the late 19^th century, Luther Kountze, one of four enterprising brothers, sons of German immigrants, in a reversal of the usual western movement, having made his fortune in banking in Denver, came east and established Kountze Brothers, a Wall Street banking firm. In 1875 he married Annie Parsons Ward, a descendant of two old New York families, the Barclays and the Delanceys.

In the 1880s Luther Kountze began to amass the four thousand acre estate which included what are now Delbarton, Morristown National Historical Park and Lewis Morris County Park. He developed the northeast corner of his holdings as a summer retreat with a large stone mansion, a working farm and several outbuildings such as barns and a dairy, a carriage house and stable, which later served as Delbarton’s first gymnasium. The mansion was completed in 1883 and the Italian Garden to the west of the main house was added after the turn of the century.

Luther Kountze had four children: Barclay Ward, William Delancey, Helen Livingston and Annie Ward. The estate was evidently named by borrowing a syllable from each of the first three childrens’ names. After Luther Kountze’s death in 1918, the decision was made to sell the Delbarton property.

Whatever may be the truth about the choice of Delbarton, on 18 August 1925 the Chapter of St. Mary’s Abbey sided with Father Ambrose and voted to purchase for $155,000 slightly less than four hundred acres of the Delbarton estate. Ten percent was paid immediately and on 1 December 1925 the Chapter minutes record “Today we took full possession of the Kountze Estate in Morristown.” The balance of the $150,500 had been paid.

Much work had to be done to prepare the main house and outbuildings to function as a monastery and house of studies. First of all, during the summer of 1926 central heating was installed in the main house as it had been only a summer home for the Kountze family.  During this same summer of 1926, three pioneer monks were sent to establish a community at Delbarton, Father Edward Bill, superior, Fathers Ambrose Huebner, and Norbert Hink, the artist, who also served as pastor of at Notre Dame of Mont Carmel Church in Cedar Knolls.  Shortly after arriving Father Ambrose fell and broke his hip, requiring the care of Brother Aloysius Hutten, a registered nurse.

The Kountzes’ caretaker, and later Mr. Alphonse Helmer, were employed for much work needed to be done. In the main house the music room and the formal dining room became the chapel and monastic refectory. During the summer scholastics and clerics, college and theology students, resided at Delbarton and maintained the lawns and the farm. On 14 September 1927 the monastery and school of theology at Delbarton were formally inaugurated by Abbot Ernest Helmstetter. The resident community numbered between fifteen and twenty, increasing during the summer when recently professed novices, clerics and students returned from their respective schools. During the early thirties scholastics took their first two years of college at Delbarton. All lived, prayed, studied, and ate in the one building, the former Kountze mansion, united by the common life, some hardship and a pioneering spirit.

Proximity allowed the young to be inspired by the mature and tried, especially by brothers like the legendary Brother Isadore Stumpf who planted and maintained the vegetable gardens, orchard, vineyard and directed the harvest of corn alfalfa and hay, drove his draught horses, (no tractor for him) slaughtered and butchered pigs. Monks of the decades of the thirties and forties never forgot the sweaty, dirty late summer days of the annual harvest of corn for the dairy herd in “forty acres”, the last major effort of the summer and the occasion for a final community celebration before returning to classes.

The late 1920s also saw the arrival at Delbarton of three Benedictine sisters from their motherhouse in Ridgley, Maryland. They were later joined by three more and all made their home in the gardener’s cottage, now a faculty family residence. The sisters cared for the meals and laundry of the monks, and later of students at Delbarton in its early days. Like the sisters who taught in St. Mary’s School in Newark and worked in the monastery kitchen and laundry, they were silent paragons of the Benedictine culture of Ora et Labora that the young monks were in the process of assimilating.

As the house of studies got under way the influx of young monks resident the year round necessitated a more formal administration. Thus, Abbot Ernest appointed Father Vincent Amberg to be the first prior of St. Mary’s Monastery.