When Henry VIII’s mail-fisted minions hauled the monks from Llangollen Valle Crucis in Denbighshire, North Wales in 1535, their exertions brought down the curtain on religious monasticism in the Anglican world. Schism within the ranks of the Christian fold brought profound change to the order of worship; and religious asceticism - the deeply introspective life of celibacy and Holy Orders - was deemed Popish and unsustainable under protestant creeds.
The very idea that Anglicanism would revive Holy Orders 300 years later in the remote Carolina mountains was as ludicrous as believing that the Tudor dynasty would lose its vice grip on the English throne. Yet, how could an ancient Anglican ideal take root in the Scots-Irish environs of Western North Carolina?
It’s a commonly accepted fact that Anglicanism never made serious inroads beyond the southern coastal plain during colonial times. Circuit-riding priests from London performed marriage rites for the backwoods parents of babies being baptized. War with Britain brought about a collapse of church authority in the upstate of the Carolinas. The vast majority of these settlers were unchurched.
Save for some Calvinist meeting houses, the Carolina upcountry was a spiritual wasteland in the aftermath of the Revolution. Perhaps it was the rigid requirements for Anglican ordination that left them lagging.
The Scots-Presbyterians labored as well under the constraints of having just one seminary — Hampden-Sydney.
The Wesley-ites and the Baptists gained advantage with their zeal for spirited evangelism.
Passionate preaching and Isaac Watts’s catchy-hymns appealed to the hardy pioneers. They’d had a bellyful of rituals and dogma from Europe’s bishops and bewigged priests. That’s precisely where Hertford, North Carolina bachelor and sawmill foreman William West Skiles, was in his spiritual life when he was offered the job of farm overseer at Valle Crucis’ Holy Cross Episcopal Church in the Watauga Valley. That groundskeeper job evolved ultimately into Skiles recreating monasticism through Anglican Holy Orders - something that had been abandoned seemingly forever 300 years ago, 4000 miles away.
William West Skiles was not as unlikely a convert to celibate Anglican monasticism as was the Apostle Paul to Christianity, but he was a close second. This robust, pious man was a lumberjack, a sawmill operator, and a rural jack-of-all-trades. Anything that could be achieved through ingenuity and manual labor was within his realm.
In retrospect, the geography of western North Carolina was the ideal of the bucolic settings being sought by all sorts of utopian societies springing up in America in the early 1800s. It’s worthwhile to note that the new republic was nearly three generations old by the 1840s, and already there were citizens who were disappointed in the contentiousness of America’s democratic experiment.
Different groups sought to redefine their lifestyle to harmonize with God and nature.
Besides the Quakers, Shakers, Mormons, and Moravians — all religiously-affiliated townships - there was Brook Farm, an outgrowth of transcendentalism located near Roxbury, Massachusetts. The North American Phalanx was a Fouriest community near Monmouth, and La Reunion, also devoted to French egalitarian thinker Charles Fourier, existed for a while near Dallas. The Amanas commune in Iowa was another of the religious sects. These philosophical or spiritual societies were cooperatives of freethinkers and social reformers. None of the communal societies, however, had the historical significance of Holy Cross at Valle Crucis in 1847.
Left to his own devices William Skiles would have remained a lifelong member of the Old School Baptist denomination in which he had been reared. He’d have happily gone to his grave as a devout deacon had not the nationally-known botanist Henry Schrum of New York wandered into the Blue Ridge wilderness in 1842.
Schrum had read diary excerpts of 18th century naturalists Mark Catesby and John Bartram, and he wanted to see the rhododendrum-studded wilderness firsthand. On his way by horseback to Raleigh, Schrum stopped off to see his former New York friend-turned-Episcopal Bishop, Levi Silliman Ives.
Among the topics discussed by the Bishop and the botanist were the untamed beauty of the isolated Eden in the valley of the Watauga, and of the desperate unchurched nature of the pioneer people who dwelt there. Of course, Ives had to saddle his best horse and scout the western territory for himself.
Volume LXIX of Anglican and Episcopal History contains a biography of Ives which says, “He chose as the site a knoll at the base of Beech Mountain with an elevation of about three thousand feet.
The farms were to be in the valley below. In the valley, creeks intersecting the Watauga River formed an X- shaped cross in the style of a St. Andrew’s cross, and he chose the name Valle Crucis for the mission. He may have known of the ruined Cistercian abbey in Wales of the same name, which existed from 1201 until the dissolution of the monastery by Henry VIII in 1535.”
The story of William Skiles becoming an Anglican monk is so compelling that Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of the famous novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, devoted much of her professional career as a writer to researching the history of this tiny monastic order.
Bishop Ives saw the beauty of the valley at the foot of Beech Mountain. And he felt great compassion for the humble farmers eking out livings on the edge of the wild woods. With the help of Episcopalian priest Henry Hudson Prout, Ives established the foundation for Holy Cross Episcopal Church.
Within five years, Bishop Ives had recruited William West Skiles as farm foreman responsible for the apple orchard and the corn crop. Boys from miles around attended classes and recited prayers four times daily in accordance with the ancient Anglican Daily Office devotional. By the late 1840s even illiterate farmers sang religious chants as they plowed fields.
Skiles took Holy Orders and a vow of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. That may have been a bridge too far for some of the rural folks who became suspicious. Brother Skiles continued his devotion to Holy Cross Church even after the school closed. He supervised the building of the lovely hammer beam ceiling chapel of St. John the Baptist, three miles away, before he died in 1862.
Holy Cross’s monastic order expired with West, but other Anglican orders sprang up.
Now when someone tells you that he found a little piece of heaven up in Valle Crucis, you know what he is talking about!

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com.

photo provided