Terry Conrad was sitting around the Lunenburg Fire Hall with 20 other volunteer firefighters eating sandwiches and bowls of chowder and talking about the night that had been. Halloween was always a busy shift in their historic Nova Scotia hill town. There were never any cats to save in trees, but there were nuisance fires aplenty, set by nuisance-making teenagers. Smoking piles of leaves, smouldering pumpkins, such were the typical non-emergencies the men at the fire hall drove around town dousing, an annual event that petered out around midnight once the pranksters had all gone home to bed.
“There was never anything serious,” says Mr. Conrad, the former chief of the department. “But then one of our guys comes running in and says, ‘The Anglican Church, it is on fire.’”
St. John’s Anglican was a local treasure (Hillary Clinton had visited the church as a G7 spouse during the 1995 Halifax Summit), a national historic site and the second oldest Anglican house of worship in Canada. More than that, it was a place many of the men sitting around that night — Oct. 31, 2001 — including Terry Conrad, got married, baptized their kids, mourned for dead relatives and sat, in the beautiful wood pews in the beautiful old Carpenter Gothic beauty built in 1754, with friends and family.
And now St. John’s was burning up.
The fire was barely visible from the street. It was trapped in the walls and ceilings, chewing through the wood, billowing smoke. Mr. Conrad and his men tried to cut through the copper roof to get at the blaze. But it didn’t work.
Then he made a decision that haunts him to this day.
“There was no way to fight that fire from outside,” Mr. Conrad says. “We couldn’t go through the main doors because directly above them was a complete set of chimes, weighing God knows how much, and that could have collapsed.
“So I spoke to some of the church elders at the scene and said, ‘Look, we gotta break the windows. It is the only way.’ Breaking that church window was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life.
“This was my church.”
It took 147 volunteer firefighters, drawn from towns all around Nova Scotia’s South Shore, 15 hours to put out the fire. (The culprit has never been found). Congregation members wept openly as they watched an icon reduced to a burned out shell. Fifty per cent of the church was destroyed. But amid the ashes, something Father Michael Mitchell, the current priest at St. John’s, refers to as that good old “Lunenburg determination” kicked in.
“People here have a tremendous sense of perseverance,” he says.
They take what life throws at them, and then some, and they deal with it. Maybe it is a practicality that comes from living on the ocean. Maybe it is simply the way people from Lunenburg are. But a decision was made, after St. John’s fell, not to tear down what was left and build a replica church but to take what was still standing and build onto it, incorporating anything that could be saved in the construction.
St. John’s parishioners will celebrate their 10th Christmas in their rebuilt church this Dec. 25th.
“The Phoenix has risen, and it is a tremendous thing,” Father Mitchell says. “Lunenburg is the little town that could, and did.”
It wasn’t easy.
Helga Stattler and her husband, Norbert, were driving back from New York when they heard the news. Originally from Germany, the Stattlers are stained-glass artisans and restorers with a studio near town. They offered to do whatever they could to help make the church whole again.
“The church was devastated,” Ms. Stattler says. “It was awful.”
St. John’s had 27 windows. All were either shattered or damaged by fire. Volunteers sifted through the rubble, boxing up whatever glass and lead they could. Using photographs of the original windows as a guide, the couple spent 18 months piecing 27 jigsaw puzzles back together again.
“Every piece of glass that seemed OK, we incorporated into the rebuild,” Ms. Stattler says. “It was extremely challenging, because not only was it destroyed by fire, but we had to recreate the painting of the windows. And artists have their secrets. So we had to find out how to create the same style, the same paint and the same application onto the glass.
“It took tests and tests and tests to get it right.”
There were other puzzles to solve at St. John’s. Some with obvious solutions, others requiring outside help. To revive the church’s woodwork, the restoration committee turned to the local shipbuilding community. Largely idled by the demise of the fishery, the shipwrights enjoyed a renaissance for their dying art in refashioning a church roof that — from the inside gazing up — resembles the hull of a traditional Nova Scotia fishing dory.
The church’s chancel ceiling (above the altar), meanwhile, presented a more holy mystery. It originally depicted a star scene, referred to locally as a “Mariner’s Sky.” But the fire destroyed the scene save for a single painted wood panel, while the photographic record of what, exactly, had originally been there, was incomplete. A call was made to Professor David Turner, a renowned astronomer at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, asking for help.
He spotted Perseus on the surviving chancel panel, but something didn’t add up.
“You could see Perseus sitting there, and Perseus, basically, travels through the eastern sky every night,” the professor says. “It is a once a day thing. But it doesn’t usually go as far south [in the sky] today as it was showing on the panel.”
Using computer software, the academic scrolled back 2,000 years to see the sky, as it would have appeared from Lunenburg, at sunset on the very first Christmas Eve. The sky on his computer monitor matched the sky on the ceiling at St. John’s. (One part of the mystery that hasn’t been solved is how the original artist who painted the sky did so in such precise detail, without a computer).
“That’s the even bigger mystery,” Dr. Turner says, laughing.
The church formally reopened on June 12, 2005. Six firefighters, who rescued the oak altar amid the smoke and flames four years before, carried it back into the church to mark the occasion. It was scarred by fire, but the burn mark was left untouched during the restoration and is the only visible reminder inside the church of what the fire had wrought.
“The altar is like our family dinner table,” Fr. Mitchell says. “And when those firefighters carried it back in, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. St. John’s is an icon of hope for Lunenburg.”
For Terry Conrad, it is painful memory. The fire chief did what he could to save his church. But when he sees it now he often wonders: “Could I have done more?”
Mr. Conrad’s wife, Rose, sings in the choir. She will spend Christmas Eve at St. John’s. Her husband, however, prefers to stay at home, next to the fireplace, relaxing with a drink and the family dog, Toby.
“I have flashbacks — and not all bad — every time I go into the church,” he says. “When inside, a lot of my time is spent gazing around the structure, marvelling at the spectacular workmanship, being thankful for the reconstruction.
“I don’t have to look at an empty building lot every time I drive by.”
National Post
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Source:: National Post
