Catholic monasteries are not known, let alone acclaimed, for their Halloween pumpkins. That may be changing, thanks to some enterprising northern Utah Latter-day Saint family farmers.
In 1859, William McFarland settled on the banks of the Weber River in western Weber County and started a farm to feed his family. Six generations later, his descendants still cultivate the same land, but their delicious produce — including grain, sweet corn and onions — now feeds the much larger surrounding community.
In 2022, two of William’s heirs — Kenny and Jamila McFarland — launched one of the most exciting of the family’s many agricultural adventures. The McFarlands now manage the farm at the old Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity Trappist monastery in Huntsville.
One of the couple’s first major decisions at the Historic Monastery Farm involved where to grow the famous McFarland pumpkins and gourds that make northern Utah Halloweens so festive. They chose some acreage — called St. Stephen’s field — on the western edge of the abbey property.
It was an inspired choice. St. Stephen’s field holds the perfect mix of ingredients — including a wonderful backstory and legacy — necessary to germinate and nourish the crop of pumpkins growing there now.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Bill White, alongside his wife, Alane, shown in 2021, helped preserve the farmland surrounding the former Trappist monastery in Huntsville.
After the monastery closed in 2017, Huntsville residents Bill and Alane White bought the monks’ property. With help from Summit Land Conservancy and the Ogden Valley Land Trust, the Whites put the Trappist land under a conservation easement.
The Whites also promised their friends — the surviving Utah monks — that they would continue the monastery’s rich farming tradition. The Whites kept that promise by hiring the McFarlands, who have eagerly embraced the legacy of the monks.
The roots of saintly fields
(Holy Trinity Abbey archives) A Trappist monk supervises field irrigation during the early days of the Huntsville monastery.
Beginning in 1947, Utah’s monks transformed a rugged mountain ranch overrun with scrub brush and sage into fertile fields for grazing and cultivation. The monks used many traditional agricultural methods along with some rather unconventional techniques.
Each spring, as the alpine snowmelt filled their streams with cold fresh runoff, the Trappists blessed their fields with prayers and holy water. Instead of relying on conventional geographic identifiers, the monks named their fields after Catholic saints — John the Baptist, James, Lucy, Benedict, Pius and many others.
The monks named one of their largest fields after the English monk Stephen Harding. St. Stephen — along with Sts. Robert and Alberic — founded the Cistercian (Trappist) religious order in France in 1098. They succeeded by preserving the established traditions of Catholic monasticism but by adding to it as well, making it new and more vital.
(Holy Trinity Abbey archives) Trappist monks work in a field during the early days of the Huntsville monastery.
St. Stephen’s field at the old Utah monastery commands a spectacular 360-degree view of the high mountains surrounding the Ogden Valley, including the 9,000-foot peak named Monte Cristo, the mountain of Christ. The monks grew alfalfa and various grains there.
The field sits just outside the main monastery entrance gate. Through the years, the monks working there enjoyed many friendly encounters as their Latter-day Saint neighbors passed by. Of course, the monks worked hard, too.
My cowboy misadventure
During a visit to the field last year, one of the last of the Utah monks — Father David Altman — recalled the exhausting job of moving, by hand, the heavy water pipes the Trappists used to irrigate. He was not alone. Many years of monk blood, sweat and tears fertilized St. Stephen’s field.
I even made my own small and inauspicious contribution to the field’s lore. For about a decade in the 1970s, the monastery was my second home. As a boy, I worked in the monks’ bookstore and on their farm.
One day, the monks sent me into St. Stephen’s field to retrieve a runaway calf. It was the beginning and end of my cowboy career. I described the comic misadventure in my 2021 book, “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks.”
Here is an excerpt:
The monks instructed me to walk the approximate 50 yards to where the defiant calf stood. It had recently rained. I sloshed through the mud, church shoes and all, to confront my adversary. He was shorter and stouter than me, but had an extra set of legs, which I should have realized would give him a distinct advantage in a footrace. The calf arrogantly glanced up at me. The reproachful, mocking look on its face loudly proclaimed, “Bring it on, rookie!”
In my encyclopedias, I had read how in battle it often was a good strategy to try to outflank an opponent. Accordingly, I circled around in a flanking maneuver and walked up to the calf, arms wide to both sides to make myself seem larger and more imposing, but also to try to gently direct it back toward the field where the monks wanted it to graze. The calf ignored me until I got within about 3 or 4 feet, when it suddenly snorted, bolted sharply to the left, and moved faster than I had ever imagined a calf could move. Within mere seconds, the calf was about 20 feet behind me again, peacefully grazing as if nothing had happened.
I circled around again and walked up to it and once more directed it, this time more forcefully and more loudly, but with the same result. This emerging pattern repeated itself several times. After about 15 minutes or so of this pathetic excuse for herding, the calf was about 50 to 100 yards farther away from the place where the monks wanted it to be than it was when we started. I began to wish I had more closely watched the calf ropers on our rare visits to the rodeo. Alas, I had no roping skills and no rope. I am not even sure what I would have done with the crazy calf had I been able to rope it. The calf outweighed me, had home-field advantage, and, if roped, likely would have dragged me around the pasture at will.
Luckily, our one-sided faceoff soon bored the calf and, no thanks to me, it trotted back to the field where it belonged. When I returned to the waiting monks leaning on their truck, they thanked and praised me profusely, hiding what must have been great amusement about what had just unfolded.
The birth of jack-o’-lanterns
(Michael Patrick O’Brien) The rustic red barn at the Historic Monastery Farm pumpkin patch in Huntsville.
A number of the Utah Trappist monks who toiled in St. Stephen’s field much more successfully than me — and who now rest in the quaint monastery cemetery just up the road — were Irish. Some were born across the Atlantic, on the auld sod itself.
It was the Irish who first carved faces into gourds and lit them from within to scare off evil spirits. After coming to America, Irish immigrants realized pumpkins served this same purpose quite nicely, thus giving birth to the jack-o’-lanterns we know and love today.
The Utah Trappist monks never used jack-o’-lanterns, and instead noted how All Hallows Eve ushered in All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1 — when good Christians remember the best of us — and then All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2, when we honor our dearly departed loved ones, whether canonized or not.
The monks did use pumpkins and other cornucopia, however, to decorate their church and altar in the autumn. The visual display of the seasonal bounty reminded them to thank God for the good harvest and many other blessings.
The present pumpkin patch
(McFarland Family Farms) Some of the colorful pumpkins at the Historic Monastery Farm pumpkin patch in Huntsville.
The McFarlands’ delightful new pumpkin patch extends and builds upon this rich legacy of St. Stephen’s field at the Historic Monastery Farm. In late summer, the patch hosts a farmers market around a rustic red barn the Whites built at the south end of the field.
In mid-September, the other produce gives way to pumpkins.
The patch includes a “you pick” option for the public. Kids and adults alike can choose from a half-dozen varieties of colorful gourds and harvest them, too. The McFarlands also host fall festivals and autumn dances in the Whites’ red barn.
A whole new generation of adults and children alike now can go to St. Stephen’s field, feel the peaceful spirit of the monks, enjoy the natural beauty of the surroundings, find adventures and give thanks.
Preserving something old and historic while starting something new. That’s what St. Stephen did nearly a thousand years ago when he founded the order of monks who also lived, worked and prayed in Huntsville for seven decades.
And it’s what the McFarlands and the Whites are doing today — with pumpkins — on a few of those lovely northern Utah monk acres named after the old English saint.
Michael Patrick O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City who often represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters. His book “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks,” about growing up with the monks at an old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, was published by Paraclete Press and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best nonfiction book of 2022.