Rebirth, renewal at historic Lynn church

LYNN – As Christians everywhere prepare for Holy Week, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church is enjoying its own resurrection of sorts.It was just a year ago that the rounded east wall of the South Common Street church was shrouded in scaffolding as work got underway on what turned out to be a $629,000 project to fix faltering mortar joints, repair the tiled roof and replace timber rotted from more than a century of water damage.”Last Easter, March 31, was the day before we started mobilization with the contractor,” said St. Stephen’s Senior Warden Chris Trahan. “This Easter we’re looking at grass growing in green and flowers coming up knowing that the building is secure.”Built in 1881, St. Stephen’s one of city’s true gems, Trahan says.HistorySt. Stephen’s was originally located just about where Fecteau-Leary Junior Senior High School sits today at 33 North Common St. In 1880 it moved across the common, when Enoch Redington Mudge had the architectural firm of Ware and Van Brunt design a Gothic-Romanesque-style church in the shape of a Latin cross facing east. Using granite quarried from Mudge’s own estate, it was to be built in memory of his son and daughter, both deceased.The rambling church boasts a bell tower that stands 125 feet tall, a nave 49 feet high and over 41 Tiffany stained glass windows, which are thought to be among the oldest ecclesiastical Tiffany windows in the world. That includes four extraordinary Tiffany windows, two each designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Francis Millet.Unfortunately for Mudge, he died three weeks before the church was completed and his was the first funeral held in the new worship space.One hundred and thirty-two years later, the building was showing its age. For the Rev. Jane Gould, preaching from the altar, sanctuary and chancel area on a rainy day was akin to delivering a sermon in an open air church. The percussion from rain hitting the multitude of buckets set about was sometimes louder than the storm itself, she said.An anonymous donor helped church officials launch Phase I of what will ultimately be a $5 million exterior renovation project. Trahan said the work done over the last year represents only a fraction of what needs to be done, but it’s a good start.In the beginning there was water”Before they could even do the work they had to completely clean the building,” Trahan said.Workers had to remove years of environmental and biological debris and then chisel out layers of mortar before reaching what was original to the building.”When they found the original mortar, they took it to a lab and analyzed it,” he said.Once it was analyzed, workers could mix an exact match, which Trahan said provided a uniform strength that the wall previously lacked. The mortar also reacts as intended, expanding and contracting according to the weather, Trahan explained.During the renovation, sections of the walls crumbled away as capstones and old mortar were removed. Trahan said it was shocking to find pockets of wet sand, sandstone that had completely deteriorated, and actual puddles between the walls where water had remained locked in due to well-intentioned but poorly executed repair jobs.”It was like they were bleeding water,” he said.They were also surprised to find a third “rubble wall” sandwiched between the exterior and interior sandstone walls, Trahan said. Workers found the wall, that is largely made of debris and designed to add strength, when they removed the capstone and bricks, that tied the interior and exterior walls together, he said.While the outside, with its repaired and retiled rooftop and shiny new mortar, may not look vastly different than before, what it’s done inside is enormous, Trahan said.To look at the altar area, the only major difference is that the tarps, protective plastic wrap and buckets that attempted, often in vain, to catch the rain that poured onto the altar during rainstorms, are gone. But that in itself is a big deal because it means the altar area is dry, Tra