Richardton, North Dakota

Richardton, North Dakota grew up as a Northern Pacific railroad town in eighteen eighty-three, but its identity was permanently shaped by a group of Swiss Benedictine monks who arrived a decade later. In eighteen ninety-three, Father Vincent Wehrle led a small monastic community from Devils Lake southward and established a priory outside Richardton in eighteen ninety-nine, naming it Saint Mary's. German-Russian and German-Hungarian homesteaders who had poured into the surrounding Stark County plains in the eighteen nineties found in the monks a spiritual anchor for their new prairie lives.

The Holy See elevated the priory to an abbey in nineteen oh three, and Wehrle became its first abbot. Assumption Abbey still stands on a hill outside town, its Romanesque church rising unexpectedly over the shortgrass badlands. For a time the monks brewed beer, a tradition with deep Benedictine roots, and operated a press.

Richardton today has fewer than seven hundred residents, but Assumption Abbey continues as a working monastery and welcomes visitors, an unlikely survivor of the wave of institutions that the railroad and immigrant faith once built across the High Plains.