Council keeping Monastery under town protection
Cumberland updates management plan for 500-acre property
CUMBERLAND – The Cumberland Town Council has adopted a revised conservation and management plan for the town-owned Monastery grounds that reaffirms the town’s perpetual protection of the 500-acre property off Diamond Hill Road.
Cumberland Planning and Community Development Director Jonathan Stevens told the Town Council at a public hearing last week that the new Monastery conservation and management plan is a complete reworking of the 2004 Monastery master plan, which served as an important foundation document for conservation and management of the property for the past 13 years.
The former Cistercian Monastery of Our Lady of the Valley, off Diamond Hill Road, was largely destroyed by a 1950 fire, but the town ultimately acquired its remaining structures and the 524 acres of its grounds through open space purchases in the 1960s and 1970s. Considered a historical and environmental gem, the property is protected by a 2004 conservation easement that restricts land development.
The new plan, which sets guidelines for the next five years, takes into account subsequent statutory enactments by the Town Council and the General Assembly in 2011 and 2016 that have added significant barriers to revising or repealing the easement. Repealing the easement was actually considered three years ago, when town officials proposed a ballot question seeking permission to locate a $12.5 million public safety complex on 10 acres of the monastery lands opposite the U.S. Post
Office at Chapel Four Corners. In the face of a potential legal challenge, that proposal was eventually withdrawn.
“The 2004 Monastery master plan was a solid first plan, but we substantially re-wrote it to make it more respectable and relevant,” Stevens said. “With adoption of this plan, the town reaffirms its commitment to the preservation of the Monastery’s natural environment.”
According to Stevens, the new plan documents the Monastery’s history, ecology, institutional uses, hiking trail system, other recreational uses, development restrictions, maintenance regimen, and allowed and prohibited activities. A number of minor site improvements are also recommended.
The document was drafted in collaboration with the Planning Department, Highway Division, Parks and Recreation Department, Conservation Commission, Mayor William Murray and members of the Monastery Preservation Alliance, a group of citizens that banded together a few years ago to ensure the town honors the 2004 conservation easement and restrictive covenants agreement that protects and conserves the Monastery.
“This new plan has significant protections to ensure that the conservation easement is followed both in prohibiting development and in the way things are remediated and maintained going forward,” said Kim McCarthy, a lawyer and member of the alliance.
Murray said the new plan will ensure that the Monastery remains an important cultural center as well as a refuge for wildlife.
“Everyone knows the contentious beginnings around the public safety complex,” he said. “This plan will make sure that the character of the Monastery is protected moving forward.”
Located in the densely-developed Monastery Heights neighborhood, the Monastery consists of eight individual lots totaling about 500 acres. It is Cumberland’s largest park.
In 1902 the Trappists of the Foundation of Petit Clairvaux in Halifax, Nova Scotia, acquired about 300 acres of land from the Diocese of Providence. The site became the Monastery of Our Lady of the Valley, one of the first Trappist monasteries in the United States.
The Cistercian monks farmed the land, diverted, impounded, and channelized the Monastery Brook, cultivated orchards and quarried Pigeon granite for the construction of the Abbey of Our Lady of the Valley. At one point after World War II as many as 130 monks lived, worked and prayed on the property.
On March 21, 1950, a huge fire all but destroyed the Abbey. Much of what remained was demolished. Remnants of the remaining structure have been preserved and adaptively reused as the Hayden Center and Cumberland Town Library. The Trappists relocated to Spencer, Massachusetts, where the order remains to this day.
The Town of Cumberland acquired the Monastery property in three separate purchases.
The first was in 1968 by the Cumberland Water Department, a 20-acre lot at the northwestern most corner of the site.
A water supply tank was erected there in 1972. Also in 1968, a second purchase of 365 acres was accomplished with financial support from the Rhode Island “Green Acres” conservation program. The final purchase of 120 acres and the remnants of the Monastery buildings was made in 1972.
In the 2004 campaign for mayor, candidate David Iwuc proposed that all-terrain motorized vehicles be allowed to use some of the trails at the Monastery. It was this prospect that galvanized the incumbent Town Council to adopt a conservation and management plan for the monastery.
In 2016, a comprehensive plan adopted by the Town Council and approved by the state that reaffirmed that the Monastery land is to be maintained its present state and not further developed.
‘This plan will make sure that the character of the Monastery is protected moving forward.’ – Kim McCarthy, member, Monastery Preservation Alliance