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The History of Our Stained Glass Windows

The Original Church

 

The first Anglican church in Chestertown was a wooden structure built as early as 1707, but no later that 1709 (early records are unclear).  In 1720, it was razed and replaced with a brick structure, using bricks brought from England.  Then in 1767, a new two-story structure was built on the same site.  These two artist’s conceptions give us some idea of what how that third church might have looked.  The one on the left is a detail in the 1860 Martenet wall map of Chestertown published in 1860.  The one on the right is, by Guy Fairlamb,  was taken from Washington College’s 1982 Bicentennial Graduation Program.  Located on the present site, this church served the people of Chestertown as a chapel of ease for St. Paul’s Kent near Rock Hall until 1766, when Chester Parish was created and the church became the chapel of ease for the new Christ Church at I.U.

1907 Bird’s Eye View of Chestertown

 

This is a bird’s-eye view of Chestertown rendered in 1907.  Scroll down to take a better look at the detail of Emmanuel Church outlined in red.

This detail shows the church right after the 1905 bell tower and parish hall were added.  Ignore these in your mind's eye, because all we're interested in here is the 60-foot-long and forty-foot-wide nave on the right, which is exactly the same as it was in 1879 before the roof was lowered and the church converted from two fllors to a tall single-story building by lowering the roof. Let's overlay the silhouette of the original church on this picture to see what happened.

This is what happened during the 1879 renovation.  First, imagine the detail on the left rotated slightly to the right and then superimposed on the larger picture.  Then imagine removing the balcony floor from the inside, jacking up the roof enough free it from its supporting walls, removing the top twelve feet of the outside walls to create a very tall single story, and then finally, very slowly and carefully, lowering the entire roof onto its new walls.

 

Note that what used to be the main entrance on the right side of the church has become a window, and that there are still two more windows to its left and to its right, just as it was in 1709 and still is today.  That’s because the lowered walls still have the same number of trusses with supporting posts between the windows as in the original building.

The estimate for the entire remodeling project was $3,600.  The congregation raised $4,600, and the Vestry voted to use the extra money to purchase stained glass windows for the entire church.  It is likely that the windows were purchased from the Montgomery-Ward mail-order catalog, since the geometric style of window was available intheir catalogs at that time for less than a dollar a square foot.  Nevertheless, it is likely that additional funds had to be raised to complete the project.  The Eccleston family contributed the triptych windows in the chancel, which means that thirteen geometric windows were needed to glaze the entire church.

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