Maine's Capital Area

The Kennebec Historical Society’s June Public Presentation: “The Tiffany Windows of Augusta’s South Parish Congregational Church”

When the South Parish Congregational Meeting House of 1809 burned in 1864, the building was replaced by the present granite church constructed between 1865 and 1866 from designs by Francis H. Fassett of Portland. Thirty years later in 1895 the Reverend J.W. Williamson undertook to enhance the interior of this great Gothic Revival church by installing stained glass in each of the window openings. Eight of the twelve of the richly colored windows were the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany of New York, the leading stained glass artist in America. How Tiffany revolutionized the making of stained glass, which he called favrile glass, is described in a Kennebec Journal article from the spring of 1895:...new combinations of color with color, color over color, the deepening of tone, quality of texture, the introduction of new colors, the union of metal with glass, the wonderful ornamental effects obtained by imbedding lines and threads of one colored glass into glass of another color, while they are in a molten state, and during the operation of blowing.

On the afternoon of Easter Sunday in 1895, the Reverend Williamson addressed the congregation about several of the new Tiffany windows and the persons in remembrance of whom they were given. The Kennebec Historical Society’s June 15th meeting affords an opportunity to view these remarkable windows and hear an illustrated lecture about them by Maine State Historian Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.

A native of Portland, Maine, Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., attended Deering High School, Colby College, and Boston University and was the recipient of honorary doctorates from Bowdoin College and the Maine College of Art. At the age of thirteen, Shettleworth became interested in historic preservation through the destruction of Portland’s Union Station in 1961. A year later he joined the Sills Committee which founded Greater Portland Landmarks in 1964. In 1971 he was appointed by Governor Curtis to serve on the first board of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, for which he became architectural historian in 1973 and director in 1976. He retired from that position in 2015. Shettleworth has lectured and written extensively on Maine history and architecture, his most recent publication being Maine Photography: A History, 1840-2015, which he co-authored in 2015. Mr. Shettleworth has served as State Historian since 2004.

The Kennebec Historical Society June Public Presentation will take place on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, at 6:30 p.m. at the South Parish Congregational Church, 9 Church Street in Augusta.