Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, Virginia

The Our Lady of the Angels Monastery is a 507 acres (205 ha)Trappistine monastery near Crozet, Virginia (in the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia), which sits in a small valley of the Appalachians near Route 64. They are not cloistered from the public.

On April 29, 1987, six nuns set out from Mount Saint Mary's Abbey in Wrentham, Massachusetts, to found a new house of Cistercian nuns. They found a cheese farm selling at a discount price with all of the dated cheese-making machinery still intact on the property.

Trappists emphasize self-sufficiency and manual labor. Therefore the idea of a small monastery producing and selling cheese to support itself appealed greatly to the nuns, and they took up residence in the two small log cabins on the property. Formally founded on May 1, Our Lady of the Angels Monastery became the fifth house of Cistercian nuns in the United States, and the first situated in the South.

Work soon began on the new brick monastery for the Sisters on a nearby hill. The new structure was dedicated on April 29, 1989. The building had a small chapel that is open to the public daily, where the Sisters celebrate mass with a live-in priest and receive daily communion.

Learning to work the cheese-making machinery proved a challenge for the inexperienced Sisters, who knew nothing about the art and were working with old equipment that had been out of use for some 6 years. Happily, neighbors stepped in to help out. Hearing about the dilemma, Jim and Margaret Morris, self-described aging hippies, shared their cheese-making skills and knowledge and before long the nuns were ready to sell. In November 1990 the Sisters began the production of Gouda (cheese) as their main means of self-support.

Of the original Charter group, only Sister Barbara and Sister Mary David are still in residence at OLA. Sister Barbara acts as the formation director and is in charge of vocations at the monastery. Their community has grown from the original six to a full dozen, ranging in age from 40 to 77. As their numbers grew to finally double their starting number, the Sisters realized that they would need more room for dormitories and working. Therefore, in early 2006 the Sisters briefly interrupted their cheese-making for the beginning of an expansion of their monastery. Construction finished in February, 2008, providing the community with new rooms, extra space, and (most importantly), updated machinery for the production of gouda.

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