Rising high on a hill overlooking this small southern Indiana town, the castle-like Monastery of Immaculate Conception with its turrets and towers could well be a stop on a European tour of historic cathedrals.

The monastery, with its Byzantine-Romanesque buildings which include an 87-foot-high domed church, is one of the largest communities of Benedictine sisters in this country. In 1867, four nuns of the Benedictine St. Walburga Abbey in Eichstaett, Bavaria, were lured here to educate the area's many Catholic immigrants by the dense forests that reminded them of their native land.

The grounds of the Monastery of Immaculate Conception, which spread out over 190 acres, once allowed the nuns to be completely self-sufficient. They had crops and cows for milk, meat and food; an orchard; a school; and even an airplane and small landing strip. Now, the grounds are given over to paths that lead to gardens, a grotto dedicated to the Virgin Mary, a small peace garden by the front entrance of the monastery and a labyrinthine based upon the one in Chartres, France.