Stained Glass Window Restoration

It was back in 2013 that we last charged a committee with the task of determining if and when our stained glass windows should be restored. It does not take a trained eye to see that they are showing signs of their age (160 years or so). That said, it is not an easy matter to determine when work should be done on them. One of the restorers we interviewed in 2014 said, “In very good condition for their age . . . Reinforcement cement is good largely due to oversized lead channels. Do not need releading for 50 to 75 years.”

Most of the professional opinion however tended to what we’ve been noticing even over the last two decades — sagging window sections, only held in place by rebar, and more and more wires letting loose, unable to carry the load. The result, especially in the high risk areas in the attic where temperatures fluctuate the most, is that more and more panes will crack, and eventually fall out.

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Early this year, Lew Petit and I met with one more fairly local stained glass window restorer , Kathy Chapman from Corinth, VT. We were impressed by her careful attention to the windows and by her knowledge and aesthetic vision. We decided we would hire her if her references came back good and her price reasonable. We have hired her and she will be work in a week or two.

Her process will entail removing the two windows at the front of the church, transporting them to her shop in Corinth, taking them entirely apart and rebuilding with fresh lead caning. She will endeavor to replace broken pieces with matches and also replaced mismatched or misaligned pieces with properly matched or properly aligned. (If you look carefully you’ll see that some of the pieces have a “grain” and that have been installed 90 degrees off because they ran out of glass.) Each window will take a month or so to complete.

If we are happy with her work and she is happy working on our windows, we will contract with her to do the remaining work.

This work is not inexpensive, as you can imagine. We are fortunate to have recently been given an undesignated gift of about $160,000 from the Lena and Nathaniel Gage Family Fund. Given that the preponderance of opinion is that this work must be completed sometime in the next few decades, (or we lose them forever) it made sense to the Church Council to memorialize Mr. Gage and his benevolence with new windows. The gift will be appropriately noted with a small marker somewhere, yet to be decided.