Long before any church was built here, seven springs of cold mineral water drew people to this corner of Shenandoah County. Relics found near the springs point to a Native American settlement, and the waters were said to have healing powers - a claim that brought white visitors by the mid-19th century. Hotels followed, the largest the Orkney Springs Hotel, begun in the 1850s. By the late 1800s, Episcopal services were being held in the hotel parlor, often led by Robert Atkinson Gibson, the Sixth Bishop of Virginia. In 1902 Bishop Gibson bought a cottage called Tanglewood for his summer use and decided the diocese needed a year-round presence at Orkney Springs. He died in 1919 before he could finish the project. His son-in-law took it up.

The Reverend Edmund Lee Woodward and his wife had bought land at Orkney Springs and vacationed there each year. After Bishop Gibson's death, Woodward cut down a hundred trees, built a log cabin called Gibson Cottage finished in 1928, and oversaw construction of the Cathedral Shrine of the Transfiguration in a natural amphitheater on the bishop's old land. Built from 1924 to 1925, the shrine includes a bell tower, sacristy, shrine crossing, choir and clergy stalls, pulpit, font, and lectern - all the architectural pieces of a cathedral, simply open to the sky. The stones came from the mountain itself, hauled out one by one. At the consecration in 1925, the Woodwards presented a Deed of Donation giving the land to the Diocese of Virginia. Bishop Henry St. George Tucker named Woodward rector of the shrine for life or until he resigned.

Woodward's next project was practical. In 1928 he proposed a retreat that could accommodate 120 guests. Bishop Tucker approved the plan on one condition: it would not appear in the diocesan budget. Woodward built. He raised cottages, a refectory, a kitchen, and a swimming pool, and bought up existing houses around the property to fold into the retreat. In 1929 he acquired more land from the failing Orkney Springs Hotel. After Woodward's death in 1948, Wilmer E. Moomaw took over as director and ran Shrine Mont from 1950 until 1988. Under Moomaw, the property was renovated and expanded, attendance grew, and the retreat broadened into the institution it is today. In 1979 Shrine Mont bought The Virginia House - the historic Orkney Springs Hotel itself - and added it to the campus, restoring the 96,000-square-foot 1873 building in 1987.

Shrine Mont today covers about 1,100 acres of forest at the foot of Great North Mountain, butting up against the George Washington National Forest. The footprint includes the open-air shrine, the Shelter Chapel beside it, Gibson Cottage where the Woodwards lived, the Virginia House, and the original Tanglewood cottage that started the whole thing. The novelist Armistead Maupin, later famous for the Tales of the City series, spent time at Shrine Mont with his family as a teenager. He has written about a North Carolina childhood that included Episcopal mountain retreats; the open-air cathedral and the cluster of clapboard cottages he would have known are still recognizably the same buildings standing today, weathered and quietly used, season after season.