INSIDE STORY
Picking up the
BY JANET WHITMAN PHOTOS BY STEVE SMITH, VISIONFIRE STUDIOS
A force of nature destroyed the 155-year-old stained glass window in a Pictou church in 2019. The fragments that survived are now pieces of history looking for a new home.
The North Shore
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n 1880s-era debate over music in the Presbyterian church and a devastating hurricane 130 years later are leading to a new chapter for hundreds of pieces of stained glass. The force of September 2019’s Hurricane Dorian blew out most of the 10-foot-tall stained-glass window high above the front doors at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Pictou, scattering shards all over the three-way intersection at Coleraine Street, Church Street and Beeches Road. “I arrived at dawn and started sweeping up glass,” says Murray Hill, clerk of session with the church. “The wind pulled out the stained glass and dropped a third of it onto the street. A third was hanging and another third was left intact in the window. We salvaged what we could.” Hill was too busy with the clean-up job to think of taking pictures of the damage. “I was more concerned with the liability. We had it boarded up within a day.” The call was made not to reinstall the three sections of stained glass. The high cost of repair was a deciding factor, but so too was the history of music in the Presbyterian church, considered carnal by many clergy and churchgoers back in the 1880s. When the 1866 Gothic structure was rebuilt after being razed by fire in the 1890s and stained-glass windows installed, no music, neither hymns nor an organ, was allowed during church services. Those opposed to music eventually wound up in coffins and the debate was over, says Hill. “We call those crucial funerals.” A Casavant pipe organ arrived from Montreal. It found a prime spot, up in the balcony – obscuring the view of the window.
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