Hieromonk Panteleimon (Nizhnik), after spending ten years at St. Tikhon's Orthodox Monastery near
South Canaan, Pennsylvania, wanted to live a more rigorous monastic life. Moreover, after a 1926 split between ROCOR and the group which would later become the
Orthodox Church in America, he wanted to stay with the Church Abroad. He shared this desire with Ivan Kolos, a local choir director living at the monastery. Together they decided to find a place to live a “genuine monk’s life.” They traveled to
Herkimer County in
Upstate New York, where they bought the Starkweather farm near Jordanville for a $25 down payment. In order to pay off the mortgage, Panteleimon worked at the
Sikorsky Airplane Factory in
Stratford, Connecticut as a wing mechanic, while Kolos remained at his parish. Life was hard: they lived in a small building, kept a horse and cow, and instead of a stove used hot stones to cook their food. The small brotherhood soon bought another, larger house nearby, bought another 200 acres of land, and began farming and dairy operations. They also obtained a printing press and a
linotype machine and began publishing spiritual works. and members of the nearby
Baptist church visited the monastery for a service. In 1946, fourteen new monks arrived at Jordanville, headed by Bishop
Seraphim (Ivanov). These included some of the future leaders of the Russian Church Abroad, including the future Metropolitan
Laurus (Škurla), who was then Novice Vasily. The brotherhood was originally based in the
St. Job of Pochaev Monastery in
Ladomirová,
Czechoslovakia, which had been founded by Archbishop Vitaly when he was still an archimandrite. After a brief stay in Munich, the Brotherhood accepted the invitation of Bishop Vitaly to join the struggling Brotherhood at Jordanville, resulting in the largest Orthodox Monastery in America. The Brotherhood of St. Job brought St. Job's
printing press with them across the Atlantic, and, until the fall of the Soviet Union, Holy Trinity Monastery was the only place in the world that could
typeset in
Church Slavonic. In 1944 construction began on a new monastery cathedral, with many of the bricks salvaged from a demolished factory. The cathedral was designed by Roman Verhovskoy, and the head of the building committee was Nicholas Alexander (Aleksandrov), a professor at
Rhode Island State College and the future dean of the seminary. The cornerstone of the church was laid in 1947, and the church was completed in 1951; the Governor of New York,
Thomas E. Dewey, attended the dedication. The construction of the church was greatly aided by the nearly 50 monks and lay-workers who had joined the monastery after leaving post-war Europe. Among them was Archimandrite
Cyprian (Pyzhov), who had with his assistant monk
Alypy (Gamanovich) (future Archbishop of Chicago) frescoed the interior of the church, covering the 700 square feet of walls with over 400 icons. New monastic quarters were built from 1954 to 1957. and
Utica. On December 3, 2011, on the feast day of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple, government officials came to the monastery, enjoyed food, and listened to talks held in the seminary hall, where the official ceremony making the monastery a national
historic district took place. ==Abbots==