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| A national treasure: Snow Hill church makes national historic register |
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| By Jenny Hopkinson, The (Salisbury) Daily Times |
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 |
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SNOW HILL — At about 2 o’clock each afternoon, the sanctuary at Makemie Memorial Presbyterian Church is filled with color as light from the sun streams through the stained glass windows on the southwest wall.
“Those purples and those reds are so bright they will hurt your eyes,” said Lee Johnson, a church elder.
And with a recent recognition of the building’s historical importance, the small Snow Hill congregation now has some help to make sure that the more than 100-year-old windows stay just as they are.
Makemie Memorial Church was recently entered in the National Registry of Historic Places.
The West Market Street building — which architectural historian Paul Tuart called one of the “finest examples of high gothic architecture on the Eastern Shore” — now joins other Worcester County sites including the Merry Sherwood Plantation, the Nassawango Iron Furnace and the nearby All Hallows Episcopal Church on the prestigious list.
“It brings a grand old building to the attention of not just the people in the state but also the people living here,” Johnson said. “We have important buildings and institutions that are more than just old buildings. There are people involved; there are stories involved.”
The congregation, founded in 1683 by the church’s namesake, Francis Makemie — who brought the Protestant sect to the New World — is said to be the oldest organized group of Presbyterian followers in America. The current structure is the fourth to serve the people of Makemie Memorial.
According to a history of the church compiled by Anne Kinstler, the structure was completed in 1890. It took three years and $15,000 to build.
The congregation at the time chose the facade and windows catalogue-style, and had the bricks and stained glass windows that make up the body of the church shipped downriver from Baltimore to the thriving port town of Snow Hill. The building has been added on to since — a rear extension now houses Sunday school classrooms and a kitchen.
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But for the most part, Johnson said, the curved pews and the high arched ceilings — said by congregants to be held up by faith alone — are original to
the church.
While the congregation is planning a weekend-long celebration in June to commemorate the accomplishment, the process to join the National Registry hasn’t been easy.
The church first applied in 2004 in order to take advantage of the recognition and funding opportunities — grants and low interest loans — for restorations that the program provides.
The building needed touching up, said Gwen Skeens, who joined the congregation about eight years ago and currently serves as the choir director.
While the church is in fairly good shape for a building that’s lasted a century, exterior bricks need cleaning and retouching, and the mortar needs replacing. Inside, small cracks are beginning to show in the walls, and the sanctuary needs a new coat of paint.
“There were things that are happening to the church that require restorations,” Skeens said. “As a small congregation, we just don’t have the means to do that.”
After piecing together blueprints and attempting to answer questions that only those who commissioned the project would really know, the application was submitted and the waiting began.
“I don’t know if we gave up or not, but it was definitely on the back burner,” Johnson said.
Then in November, the Rev. Debra Latture, who leads the 111-member congregation, received a letter saying the church had been accepted to the register.
“We are very proud of our church, of course,” she said. “It’s just so gorgeous.”
Now with national recognition and the benefits of being a historic site, the church will have the means to do the much-needed restoration.
“That was sort of the motivation to go ahead and apply for the registry,” Latture said. “But in the years since then, it’s been to protect the historic significance of the church and to protect it from anything architecturally abhorrent.”
And that, Johnson said, is the plan.
“We have an obligation to those that have come before us and those that will come after us to preserve the legacy of this building,” he said.
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