The community reassembled what the monks call their "Sacred Stones", the limestone blocks from the 800-year-old chapter house (meeting room) of the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Ovila that once stood in Trillo, Guadalajara, in Spain. William Randolph Hearst purchased the chapter house of the old Spanish monastery in 1925 for $97,000, dismantled it, and had the stones shipped to California in 1931, intending to include them in Wyntoon, a grand home he was building in remote Northern California. Instead, Hearst gave the stones to the city of San Francisco as part of an arrangement to abate taxes that he owed. The stones sat in San Francisco's Golden Gate park for decades. In 1955, Father Thomas Davis, abbot of the newly-founded abbey of New Clairvaux, noticed the stones in the park. From 1979 to 1983, the art historian Margaret Burke studied the stones to plan an eventual restoration project. Father Thomas Davis eventually made a deal with the city to get the 1,300 leftover stones and handle the reconstruction of the church.