Ave Maria Grotto: One Monk's Lifetime in Miniature

On the grounds of Saint Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama, a Benedictine monk named Brother Joseph Zoettl spent decades building a four-acre park full of miniature religious monuments. Zoettl was born in Bavaria in eighteen seventy-eight and came to the abbey in Cullman as a teenager in eighteen ninety-two. He became a monk, worked in the power plant, and in his spare time began constructing tiny replicas of the world's most famous shrines and sacred sites from marble, cement, cold-cream jars, broken glass, marbles, and whatever other materials came to hand.

The grotto was dedicated in nineteen thirty-four and holds one hundred and twenty-five miniature structures, including replicas of the Vatican, the Lourdes grotto, Solomon's Temple, and dozens of others. Zoettl died in nineteen sixty-one and was buried in the abbey cemetery. The Ave Maria Grotto is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and draws roughly twenty thousand visitors a year.