Dom Benedict Brosnahan on the Manor House road

As part of our series on “The Former Structures,” highlighting some of the buildings and elements of community life no longer visible to us, we take a moment here to highlight some of “the first structures” - the property Leonard Sargent discovered and chose as the site to achieve his monastic vision. In his memoir, “Pictures and Persons,” Leonard Sargent described his arrival at the place that was to become the beginnings of his monastery: “In 1918, visiting Dr. Horatio Storer in Newport, I was advised to look at a property of seventy acres on Narragansett Bay, at Portsmouth, known as Hall Manor. The very day of my visit the transfer of ownership was practically settled and all the belongings of house and out-buildings accompanied the transfer. Father Hugh Pope once asked me, ‘However did you get such a place?’ ‘Dropped a medal of Saint Benedict into a field as we drove in, to be sure.’ ‘The same old superstition!’ he said; ‘but it always succeeds.’” The decision to make this purchase was also affirmed for Sargent by a pledge he had recently received from Bishop Matthew Harkins of Providence, who had been educated by Benedictines of Douay: “Shortly before the Portsmouth property was acquired, I spent twenty-four hours with him and he told me he had been ‘saving up’ for us in our absence from America. His gift, unconditioned by place except that he ‘hoped’ that the place might be in his diocese, meant the ‘saving’ of five thousand dollars. When the property was conveyed to us I went to tell the Bishop the good news: we looked at one another and said, ‘This, surely, is Providence.’” While these narratives, together with some of the images included in this article, have been published in monastic and School publications previously, it is the duty and pleasure of our archives to recollect some of these origins. Indeed, much history is the retelling of the same old stories, and those stories of “pictures and persons” may be told somewhat differently here, or fall on new eyes. But perhaps in this retelling one may again recapture some of the “first structures” of this monastery, those Leonard Sargent discovered in 1918 when planting “the seed” - his St. Benedict medal - for his future abbey.

Matthew Harkins, bishop of Providence

An advertisement for the sale of the property gives an illuminating inventory of the contents of the property: “Mansion house, twenty-two (22) rooms, commands magnificent view of Narragansett Bay; all modern conveniences; furnace; open fireplaces; hardwood floors throughout. Fine grove of native trees and forty years’ growth of several thousand oaks, elms, maple, fir, and spruce. Big barn (thirty head cattle and horses; 100 tons hay capacity); coachman’s house, gardener’s lodge, farm house, dairy house, boat house and other buildings. Clear brook dammed for ice pond – capacity of ice house one hundred and fifty (150) tons.” (Henry W. Cooke Company Estate Agents, R.I. Hospital Trust Building, Providence, R.I.)

As an initial note, “all modern conveniences” apparently did not yet include electricity, as our archives indicate this was not installed until the beginnings of the School in the late mid-1920's. And one detects in some of the early images a kind of overgrowth of trees and other vegetation, and perhaps a certain tiredness to the Manor House itself and its environs. It may not be a surprise that shortly after the untimely death of her husband, Mrs. Hall was anxious to unload the property.