in heat, for sometimes people brought hot bricks to church, and sometimes their dogs, on which to rest their feet in cold weather. Each pew at St. Mary’s was numbered, and the pews were rented, thereby providing the parish with an important part of its income. Several pews were reserved: No. 1 was for “strangers,” No. 16 for the bishop, No. 17 for members of the Rector’s family, and No. 24 for “coloured people.” Pew No. 9 was reserved for the Governor, but since his appearances at St. Mary’s were infrequent it too was rented, on the understanding that its usual occupant would sit somewhere else when his excellency appeared. A pew was reserved for the bishop because Charles Inglis made his rural retreat, Clermont, a few miles west of Auburn, his principal residence after 1796.9 About 1865, the sides of the box pews were lowered and given scroll-shaped tops, and their doors were removed. At the same time, the pew rents were abolished and anyone was free to sit anywhere they wished in the church.
Other changes involved the acquisition, in 1862, of a hand-pumped organ in a Gothic case, which was placed in the original part of the gallery at the west end of the nave (it had been extended in 1828 across the nave windows along both the north and south sides of the building). The gallery in Georgian churches normally accommodated singers and musical instruments as well as the occasional overflow congregation. But by the 1890s this arrangement for the placement of the singers and musicians seemed old-fashioned, for the new Gothic Revival churches then being built had extensive chancels, opening out from their naves and packed with choir stalls designed to accommodate the new, robed choirs that were being formed, whose members took delight in being seen as well as heard. It was a fashion that Canon Johnson of New York later described as “Cathedralesque Chancelitis.”10 So it was that, in 1891, St. Mary’s small sanctuary was moved fifteen feet to the east. This placed it beyond the grave of Dr. Charles Inglis, the bishop’s grandson, who had been buried just outside the church in 1861 and would, from now on, be under the floor as well as in the ground. Between the sanctuary and the nave, a chancel with choir stalls and organ alcove was created, the organ alcove on the south side balanced by a new sacristy on the north elevation. This gave St. Mary’s a neo-Gothic layout, although all the other architectural elements in its fabric remained in the neo-Classical tradition. In respect to this anomaly, St. Mary’s is like St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, which although executed in the neo-Classical Renaissance Style, has the floor layout of a large medieval Gothic church.
So while much has changed at St. Mary’s since 1790, much remains the same. Most of the small panes of glass in the large, round-headed nave windows are those installed more than two hundred years ago when large sheets of glass were unavailable. Only in the east window, where a fine portrait of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Child was installed in 1895, has the original glass been replaced. The old plaster on the walls still retains as part of its composition quahog shells left nearby on the Fundy shore by dispossessed Acadian settlers as they awaited transport into exile in 1755. And most of the original shingles remain on the walls, fastened to wide, old, hand-hewn boards with the square-headed, Nova-Scotia-forged nails that were brought by soldiers on their backs ninety miles from Halifax, on foot, in the spring of 1790. The finish of the church — from the decorative wooden keystones in the window surrounds and the pediments that adorn the exterior gables, to the cornices and fluted columns of the interior — is superb.
The architect and builder of St. Mary’s Church was William Matthews, from the military ordnance department in Halifax. Much of it is of pine, felled and milled locally. The soil in Auburn is sandy, and hospitable to pine — although today there are few specimens left as magnificent as the trees that ended up in the fabric of St. Mary’s Church.
Its first rector was the Reverend John Wiswall, a Loyalist and former Congregationalist minister who had taken Anglican orders in 1764 and seen his church at Portland, Maine, burned by rebels in 1775. Its first benefactor was Colonel James Morden (after whom the nearby village of Morden, on the Bay of Fundy, is named), who played a role similar to that performed by the lord of the manor in an English country parish. A chalice and paten given by Bishop Inglis in 1790, a 1753 Bible, two long-handled wooden collection boxes, panels bearing the coats of arms of King George III and of the diocese of Nova Scotia — both said to have been painted by Bishop Inglis himself to hang over the governor’s and the bishop’s pews respectively — and two panels bearing the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer flanking the holy table on the east wall, are among the treasures preserved in St. Mary’s Church.
Of course, the church itself is its own chief treasure. But wooden churches are vulnerable to fire, and two-hundred-year-old timbers particularly so. St. Mary’s has had at least one very close call with fire. On the night of Saturday, September 20, 1981, at 2:45 a.m., the spire of the church was hit by lightning, and set ablaze. A crowd gathered, and four fire departments from nearby towns arrived only to discover that their ladders and the pressure in their hoses were inadequate to get water to where the flames were burning down the length of the spire. The rector, the Reverend Langley MacLean, called on all present to pray that the church might be saved. Some knelt and some stood — and the prayer was answered almost immediately: a gust of wind carried the water to the flames, and the fire was put out. Father MacLean claimed credit not only for the prayer, but also for his having sprinkled the entire building with holy water two weeks earlier!
When St. Mary’s was built in 1790, documents relating to its construction were placed in a gilded copper ball on the weathervane on the spire. Several times over the years the ball has fallen to the ground, usually in windstorms, and each time the documents have been copied and replaced in the ball on its return to the spire. In 1981, the old documents suffered water damage and had to be dried out and sent to Ottawa for restoration. This time copies were placed in the ball when it was put back. A lightning arrestor was added, made in the shape of a cross.
In 1986, the 1891 vestry on the north side of the chancel was replaced by a small church-hall building, designed by architect Ron Peck to blend architecturally with the church.
St. Mary’s is the earliest of seven Charles-Inglis-era churches in the Annapolis Valley. The others are at Clementsport (St. Edward’s, built in 1795), Karsdale (St. Paul’s/Christ Church, 1791–1794), Granville Centre (1814–1826), and Annapolis Royal (St. Luke’s, 1815–1822) at the western end of the Valley, Cornwallis (St. John’s, 1804–1810) near the eastern end, and old Holy Trinity at Middleton (1789–1791) in the middle, twelve miles west of Auburn. The Cornwallis and Granville Centre churches are so similar to St. Mary’s in their proportions and fenestration as to suggest that they, too, were drawn by William Matthews. Holy Trinity, Middleton, and St. Edward’s, Clementsport, have been replaced for regular use by Gothic Revival alternatives built a century later. In Middleton, the town grew up a mile or so east of the church, making its location inconvenient to a majority of the parishioners. At Clementsport, the location of St. Edward’s at the top of a hill prompted the erection of a new building lower down in order to spare worshippers the steep climb — although the factor that determined the decision to construct the new church might well have been less the steep climb and more the erection of a Baptist church at the foot of the hill. In both cases, the old churches became neglected and dilapidated through disuse, only to be rescued and restored as the twentieth century advanced and brought with it a growing appreciation of heritage architecture. Because these buildings are not used very often, they have undergone little change. Stepping into St. Edward’s, with its box pews, white plastered walls, small-paned and round-headed windows, and old pine woodwork is like going back in time into the eighteenth century.
Photo by Graham Tuck.
Photo by Graham Tuck.
Photo by Graham Tuck.
