Archive - 2016

Here's what was uncovered: vertical sheathing - classic Gothic Revival siding. Rustic, rural, right out of the pattern books! *
Able to be built of local lumber cut at local saw mills by local craftsmen, the design fit its pastoral country setting.

A dog house shed for the bulkhead had covered a section of the original siding, leaving it unchanged. The battens which had covered the joints between the boards were still there.

They were fat and curvy , creating strong shadows, beautifully following the lines of the windows. I admire how those craftsman 140 years ago reinforced the shape and rhythm of the windows as well as the verticality of the church.

The interior had been renovated several times; the floor covering updated, the ceiling lowered at least three times, the walls painted, most of the stained glass replaced, the alter reconfigured.

The iron tie rods may have been original - or not. They are visible on the right: the straight horizontal chords that run right through the curved trusses.

Those trusses simply took off half way up the wall. No base.While they were in front of the posts of the bays and symmetrical around the windows they were built up, not solid timbers.

This is how I think the church was laid out - a simple and elegant geometric design.

However, the designer, be he master carpenter or fledgling architect, did not need to know much about Practical Geometry. The elevation divides the square into halves and quarters The radii of the 2 arcs is determined by the width of the church . Very simple, not complex,

That the designer understood how the frame could create the sense of the church became clear as the layers of interior improvements were stripped from the frame.

The arches do cross. They are part of all the ribs of the bays from the narthex and the nave to the apse. They are an integral part of the frame.

We saw that crossings were exposed, visible. They were carefully joined, their edges chamferred The trefoils and quatrefoils were inserts. The whole assembly was painted in subtle shades popular at the time: metallic gold on the trusses, brick on the tracery, and on the inside edge of the patterns: red!

Perhaps the colors have faded; the emphasis has not. They were designed and carved to be seen.

The carving, the tracery matched what we saw on the arches and inserts at the transition from the wall to the roof which we had photographed and discussed. But we had not know what we were seeing.

The parts: the strength of the arches,the delicacy of the tracery, and the shapes they created were invisible when they were painted white. They had lost their grace, their power.

The church is now stripped to the frame. It will be taken down completely in the spring of 2017.

I have not seen a geometric layout like this before. I will make measured drawings; then I look at the frame more carefully.