Steeped In History
by Marc Parry, Staff Writer
Cape Cod Times
May 17, 2005
YARMOUTHPORT - Roberto Rosa placed one blue-edged petal of the flower-shaped stained glass window into the wall. Then his voice boomed down into the church from his perch on a tower of scaffolding some 25 feet up in the air.
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''How does it look, Walter?''
''Looking good,'' bellowed back Walter Chapin, who stood beside a chestnut pew topped with a gold horsehair cushion. ''Don't drop anything.''
''That's how you jinx us!'' hollered down another voice.
Rosa is a craftsman with Serpentino Stained & Leaded Glass, and Chapin is president of the Yarmouth New Church Preservation Foundation. Both were at the Yarmouth New Church on Route 6A yesterday for the beginning of the end of the building's second big restoration project.
After months of work at their Needham studio, three Serpentino craftsmen spent yesterday in Yarmouthport reinstalling 27 stained-glass panels that have been cleaned and rebuilt.
It's the latest piece in the seven-year-old foundation's push to restore the church for use as a community center. Concerts, art exhibits and plays have all been held at the building.
The Yarmouth Society for the New Jerusalem erected the Gothic-detailed church in 1870, according to the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth.
The congregation's faith derived from the teachings of the 18th century Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg.
The church was designed by the same Boston architect, Samuel J. F. Thayer, who created Brookline Town Hall and City Hall in Providence, R.I.
Over time the congregation shrank - these days the church only holds services in July and August - and it had no money to maintain the building.
By 1998, when Chapin's group took over the structure to save it, the steeple was ready to fall over. The cost to restore that was more than $200,000, half of which came from a state grant and half from fundraising.
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''Next thing you know we were in fear of losing the stained glass windows,'' said Chapin, a South Yarmouth retiree, referring to the panels on the decaying west wall. It had gotten so bad that raccoons lived in some of the beams.
So last fall, the group hired Serpentino to restore the windows and Westmill Preservation of Halifax to restore the surrounding woodwork. Workers from both companies labored on the building, and their efforts will cost about $90,000.
Yesterday, Rosa stood on the outdoor scaffolding knifing off strips of the frame so a panel would fit just right, while his colleague Matt Fallon stood on a separate scaffolding tower inside the church. Fallon said stained glass windows are ''deceptively not that fragile.
''They have a lot of flexibility to them,'' he said. ''People think for some reason, 'Oh, oh - stained glass, I can't touch it,''' he said. ''It's fairly sturdy.''
Months of work made these panels that way. In the company's Needham studio, workers laid the panels flat and took rubbings of the windows on acid-free paper to get images of the lead lines. They then disassembled the panels and discarded the lead.
They cleaned each of the hundreds of glass panes by hand.
If damaged ones were repairable, they fixed the cracks with epoxy.
If they weren't, they created a stencil and replicated the original on new glass, firing the freshly painted piece in a kiln at about 1,100 degrees.
Using new lead and the image they originally took as a guide, they rebuilt the glass panels.
''Hopefully they'll last another 100 years,'' Chapin said.
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