Category: United States

An interview with the hermit Fr. Dunstan Morrissey entitled “Your Cell Will Teach You Everything” was originally featured in Parabola magazine. It was edited and published in Catholic Digest, and is available at: http://www.catholicdigest.org/stories/200101044a.html. There is also a very nice picture of Father Dunstan, too.
NOTE: The article is no longer available, only a summary. Go to www.catholicdigest.org then Back Issues, then Issues/Articles, then January 2001. Scroll down to summary at page 44. The photograph, however, is on our Images of Eremiticism section under Hermits.

(Added Sept. 2) More information about Fr. Dunstan and Sky Farm is available in Laura Chester’s book “Holy Personal: Looking for Small Private Places of Worship (Indiana University Press, 1999). A snippet of (real audio) video is available from NewMorning TV at http://www.newmorningtv.tv/todaysshow_112102.jsp. Scroll down to “Sacred Spaces.”

(added August 18, 2010: this article from the <i>Mendota Reporter</i> summarizes the life and death in 2009 of Fr. Dunstan. URL: http://www.mendotareporter.com/V2_news_articles.php?heading=0&story_id=2901&page=81

Robert E. Harrill, called the “Fort Fisher Hermit,” was a popular hermit near Wilmington, North Carolina, from 1955-1972, receiving and entertaining visitors in the abandoned sea-side military bunker that he called home. He is the subject of several books and a documentary film. Two Web sites are: “Fort Fisher Hermit” at http://www.carolinabeach.com/history/memory/hermit.htm and “The Hermit Story” at http://www.hearlshill.freeservers.com/the_hermit_story.htm. There is a collection of Harrill’s manuscripts at the Library of East Carolina University: http://www.lib.ecu.edu/SpclColl/ead/vault/manuscripts/0428.html

An 1829 pamphlet chronicling the life of a black fugitive slave who escaped the U.S. South to New England, where he became a hermit, is reproduced by the Libraries of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Web site is: http://docsouth.unc.edu/robert/robert.html.

December 2001 article from the Christian Science Monitor about a variety of Christian hermits in the USA. One point made is that several living in urban areas are diligently saving money for rural isolation some day. Web page: http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1206/p15s1-lire.html

The Sweets of Solitude by Amos Wilson, called the “Pennsylvania hermit,” was printed in Boston in 1822. The only copy of the book is in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and has been scanned and placed on the Web at http://www.seclusion.com. It can be downloaded in .doc format, the whole book being 21 pages. Yahoo! calls it a work of fiction, and surely the melodramatic account reads that way, but the Webmaster assures me that he toured the cave in Indian Echo Cavern, Pennsylvania, where Amos Wilson, a hermit calling himself a Christian, lived for 19 years.