Stained glass windows flank the altar at St. Andrews Church in Newcastle on Nov. 16. The windows were donated to the church in the 1960s by two sisters in memory of their husbands. (Bisi Cameron Yee photo)
What started as a simple story idea for the holiday supplement became a sort of obsession.
My original pitch was to write about stained glass windows in Lincoln County churches, specifically ones that illustrated Biblical scenes which I thought would tie in nicely to the religious aspect of the Christmas season. And I would get to photograph the beautiful light as it streamed into the graceful spaces.
Time, however, was not on my side. With a looming deadline, I decided to focus on a single church: The one my parents got married in. St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Newcastle.
I reached out via email and Jim Swan, a member of the property committee, sent me what little information there was on the two stained glass windows at the front of the nave and helped me arrange a visit to the church to photograph them.
I had hoped to take pictures during the golden hour, just before the sunset. But that deadline again! I had to settle for a sunless day.
The windows were still beautiful, their colors still vibrant, but I missed capturing the effect of the light on the space. I struggled to get a decent shot of the full windows above my head. But at least I had photos.
It turns out what I needed was words. There were only two sentences about those windows in the church’s history. They covered the date installed and the names of the congregants who were memorialized.
That wasn’t going to be enough for a feature length article. I was forced to pivot.
I figured I could attend a service and talk to the congregation; collect their personal memories, emotions or artistic critiques.
The following Sunday I went to church.
But that too didn’t turn out as anticipated. Since the windows are at the front, flanking the altar where only the rector usually stands, and since they are fairly small and fairly high up, many of the people I talked to didn’t have much to share.
There was still a lot of white space in my Word document.
I was guided toward church member and professional architect Brett Donham who shared his thoughts on stained glass windows. And the lack of information available on those inset into the walls of St. Andrew’s.
When I sat down to write the story with the minimal information I had, I was still trying to figure out what the article was about. Should I write about stained glass and its place in the world of art and religion?
I researched stained glass. I looked into religious symbolism. I hit my first rabbit hole. The window facing west is, by all accounts (or the two accounts I found), an illustration of the Ascension.
But I was struck by the angel with the golden censer. Using the tried and true reporter’s trick, I Googled it.
There’s a description of such an angel in the Bible. But it’s in Revelations. I wonder if the window actually depicts the second coming as opposed to the Ascension. Without a record of the artist’s intent, it’s hard for me to say.
The second rabbit hole came when I started to research the memorialized individuals.
There’s a huge wealth of information available these days from any number of sources. But that information is disjointed, unconnected, incomplete, misleading. And often wrong.
However, I was convinced I had my angle for the article, and it was time to flex my research muscles beyond Google. Installing stained glass windows in a church can’t have been cheap. Where did the money come from?
I found my first lead in the archives of the paper I work for. The Lincoln County News carries the history of this community, and I was able to delve into the digital files and find copies of the paper from the first half of the 20th century.
The LCN used to have a social page that captured small vignettes of community members as they attended luncheons, took vacations, attended the Harvard-Yale game in Boston and were accepted into elite clubs and organizations. The wives who donated the windows were everywhere among those pages. The husbands were nowhere to be found.
Then with a little help from a more experienced researcher than I (hats off to Kathy Lizotte who pulls information from those archives practically daily), I found Coll T. Flint’s obituary and was startled to realize that he passed away AFTER the windows had been dedicated.
Was there an error in the church history when it stated that the windows were installed in 1961? Or in the LCN archives? I found confirmation there that the windows were dedicated 18 months before Flint died in 1963.
Were the windows bought and paid for in advance of Flint’s death? Death is, after all, a foregone conclusion.
Or did the historic references to installation and dedication only touch on the west-facing window, the one in memory of Anthony Barbara, who had clearly died prior to 1961?
Ancestry.com gave me more answers on the two men. Like marriage records, it’s possible that both men were on their second marriages, though I can’t say so with certainty.
Draft cards gave me information on employment. Both men did very well for themselves and it is clearer to me how their wives could afford the extravagance of memorial windows.
I tapped the Newcastle Historical Society for more information. They are lucky enough to have a building to collect physical documents, and volunteers with time on their hands to look through them.
Like other local historical societies they are struggling. Lack of funds, yes, but more importantly, lack of involvement is threatening our shared history.
Historical society members speak with longing of the diaries, photos, ships logs, or tax records that still fill the attics of Lincoln County. Those records of life before our time, more tellingly, of life before this pandemic, are in danger of being tossed out in the trash as homes are sold and cleaned out.
I had several other sources of information. I found photos in Lincoln Academy yearbooks. I visited the Highland Cemetery and found the family gravestones. I spent an afternoon pouring through the paper documents at St. Andrews, my heart skipping a beat when a familiar name caught my eye.
I even found a reference to the origin of the windows – with more sentences than I found in the books about St. Andrew’s.
I gathered enough to draw the briefest sketch of a Newcastle family that certainly seemed like they were movers and shakers in their day. And when I look at the St. Andrews stained glass windows now, I understand how they came to be. And more importantly, why they exist. To shed beautiful light not only on the altar below, but also on the past.
If anyone has information on the Munsey, Barbara, or Flint families of Newcastle, reach out to me at bcameron@lcnme.com. I’m still exploring that rabbit hole.
And please see the story on the windows on Page 16A of this edition of The Lincoln County News.
