The Story of the Monastery of Saint Peter
A beautiful thousand-acre ranch on the north shore of Harrison Lake roughly three miles east of the town of Harrison, Montana, pop. 187 souls, is offered in a Life Estate for an Eastern Orthodox monastery. Initially, it was thought that this might be an ideal site for a skete of St. John Monastery (OCA) in Manton, California, and a cross was planted and moleban celebrated by Bishop Benjamin (OCA) and Abbot Meletios (St. John Monastery) on the land in 2012. Meanwhile, the architect Mark Headley designed an Athonite-style monastery, and local OCA clergy and Hieromonk Innocent from St. John have led very popular summer youth camps on the land for the purpose of beginning construction on the Monastery and offering instruction in monastic life and Orthodox Christian living. Unfortunately, a decline in the population of St. John prevented this from happening, and in 2022 Archbishop Benjamin blessed the owners to approach other jurisdictions, making this gift available to them.
The land is in a conservation easement that designates a twenty-acre area for the Monastery and buildings related to it. The ranch features a square-log dacha and boathouse, octagonal two-story barn, and Palladian villa. The property is two miles off the grid and generates its own electricity from a wind turbine and solar array. Philosophy River, named by Lewis and Clark in 1805, flows for one mile through the land. Its Rainbow trout are resistant to the whirling disease that decimated the trout population throughout the West, and Montana Fish and Game now spawns these trout from the ranch and has successfully replenished stocks throughout the West with the Harrison Rainbow strain.
This offer has few conditions. These include a requirement that the Monastery be English- speaking and pan-Orthodox — open to all Orthodox Christian monastics and guests. The Life Estate will continue to be held by the owners until the Monastery is built and a minimum of four monks and an abbot are in full-time residence. At that time, the Life Estate will be assigned to the Monastery with the abbot as chairman of its foundation.
The Monastery will require a significant gift or gifts to be established, probably in the neighborhood of $5-6 million to build infrastructure and the main residence for 12-18 monastics, an abbot’s study, library, work spaces, guest quarters, and a temporary katholikon and trapeza per the Headley design. The footings and ground floor stone and reinforced concrete walls for this building are already in place. The entrance tower is under construction.
There are several opportunities for the Monastery to generate income via the fiber optic cable extending to the Monastery and an extensive and outfitted woodworking shop above the barn. The property also contains 100 irrigated acres ready for organic farming (no chemicals have been applied for over twenty years) and 40 acres of bottomland appropriate for fruit trees. Its proximity to Yellowstone Park, the largest ski resort in North America, and world class fly-fishing rivers and streams make “hospitality” also a potential source of income.
