Month: June 2025

Endurance, constancy, continuity – these are the virtues that stone structures possess, cathedrals most abundantly. 

As if to implant these qualities in the walls then rising, St. John the Divine collected stones resonant of its Anglican heritage during the years it was under construction. Some came from historic British cathedrals – Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Bristol, Norwich, Southwark, St. Alban’s, Worcester, Ely – others from the sites of historic monasteries – Westminster Abbey, Bury St. Edmunds, the island of Iona – and one from William Shakespeare’s parish church in Stratford-on-Avon.

The intent was to integrate the historic stones with the freshly-cut limestone and granite of the fabric as a palpable sign of the new American cathedral’s kinship with its British predecessors and its devotion to the Anglican expression of the Christian faith. Ultimately, only a few of the historic stones were set in the walls. 
The Chapel of St. Ansgar, designed by Henry Vaughn and consecrated in 1918, houses stones that medieval masons cut eight centuries earlier for two of England’s majestic cathedrals: the Cathedral Church of Christ and Blessed Virgin Mary in Worcester and the Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in Ely, hereafter referred to as simply “Worcester” and “Ely.” 

The Worcester and Ely stones comprise the niche in the left wall of the chapel’s apse, added in 1921. The color of  the unpainted surfaces comports with that of Anthony Trollope’s fictional Barchester Cathedral – “that rich, yellow grey which one finds nowhere but in the south and west of England.” The topmost stone, from a blind arcade in Worcester, bears an ogee arch enclosing the top half of a trefoil. The stones below, also from Worcester, are textured with curvilinear forms and scoring.

A squarish stone from Ely, seen below, projects from the base of the niche. Its original function may have been as a wall-mounted pedestal. It is inscribed ELY 1320. The inscription may have been added long after the stone was originally cut; the numerals are in a font that, to my eye, is more modern than medieval.

The small corbel beneath the shelf displays the “stiff leaf” foliage characteristic of the dialect of Gothic architecture known as Early English, prevalent during the late 12th to mid-13^th centuries when most of Ely was constructed.

The paint on the stones is curious – scarlet and lemon yellow on the ogee arch from Worcester, lime green, white, and gold on the Ely pedestal. There is only one other instance of painted stone in the Cathedral’s interior –  the sixteen shields bearing symbols of the apostles and evangelists in the Baptistery adjacent to the chapel. When and why were stones painted? I suggest a possible answer at the end of this article.

The niche and the chapel itself (now the Cathedral’s columbarium) are a memorial to William Reed Huntington, rector of Grace Church, longtime Cathedral trustee, chairman of its Committee on the Fabric, and a driving force behind the first phase of the Cathedral’s construction. The inscription that flanks the stones reads: 

These Stones from the Cathedral of Christ and St. Mary the Virgin Worcester England are Memorials to William Reed Huntington Sometime Rector of All Saints in Worcester Massachusetts.

The inscription seems incomplete, for it does not mention Huntington’s long service to the Cathedral. Neither does the inscription acknowledge the Ely stone, nor do the relevant minutes of the Cathedral’s Committee on the Fabric record any reference to it. The Ely stone may have been added later as an afterthought, but when and why is a mystery.

The Worcester and Ely stones were the gift of George William Douglas, a Cathedral canon from 1904 to 1913 and an honorary canon from 1920 until his death in 1926. The 1924 edition of Edward Hagaman Hall’s guidebook provides the following account of how Canon Douglas procured the Worcester stones:

Some years ago, when Canon Douglas was visiting Worcester Cathedral, England, Canon Wilson pointed to a spot in the wall where an ancient carved stone had been replaced by a modern stone, and said: “A good while ago a man of the name of Huntington, who introduced himself as Rector of a church in Worcester, Mass., begged me to give him a bit of carved stone as a symbol of the ties between England and America.” This led Canon Douglas to ask for a similar gift to be placed in St. Ansgarius’ Chapel, which is a memorial of Dr. Huntington, in a House of God where Englishmen and Americans often meet and where members of the Daughter Church have constant occasion to recall their indebtedness to the Mother Church of England.

An entry dated November 21, 1911, in Worcester’s Chapter Minutes confirms that Canon Wilson and the Dean were approved to select the stones to be sent to “the Cathedral of New York.” 

That Huntington had earlier sought out an historic stone for his parish in Massachusetts suggests that he may have initiated the collection of such stones for St. John the Divine.

I was unable to obtain similar documentation for the Ely stone. The available records indicate that Canon Douglas obtained three stones from Ely, only one which was incorporated into the fabric of St. John the Divine. 

Worcester’s Lady Chapel, the source of the niche’s stones, was built between 1224 and 1250. With its sharply-pointed arches and “stiff leaf” foliage on the capitals of its columns, it is a superb example of Early English Gothic. The bases, colonettes, and capitals of the columns are of dark Purbeck marble – a dramatic contrast to the pale limestone. 

The Lady Chapel houses the effigy of Margaret de Say (c.1182-c.1242), Baroness of Burford, who provided much of the funding for its construction. 

The charming relief seen above is on a spandrel in the Lady Chapel. We see a benefactress, perhaps Margaret de Say herself. She is shown in profile, dressed in the height of thirteenth century fashion. Facing her, in three-quarter view, a stonemason perches on the side of the arch, cradling his calipers with his left hand. His chisel sits alongside him. The lady is placing something into the mason’s right hand – a bag of coins, most likely. The mason’s relaxed posture suggests that he is at ease in the lady’s presence despite the difference in their stations. He seems quite confident that the quality of his work is worth the full value of the payment he is receiving. 

Of special interest to Divine Stone’s stonemason readers: Worcester is one of a small number of English cathedrals with its own team of on-site stonemasons. Worcester also offers training in stonemasonry, as St. John the Divine did at one time. You can learn more about Worcester’s program here:

https://www.worcestercathedral.org.uk/heritage/stonemasonry

Returning to the question of the painted stones, I detect the hidden hand of architect Ralph Adams Cram. As I trawled through the material in the Cathedral’s archives relating to the period of the niche’s creation, I came across a letter from Cram to Dean Howard Robbins, dated February 7, 1923. Of the chapels, Cram wrote:

I think the whole tendency in these chevet chapels is towards coldness and austerity. Personally, I should like to see much more gold and color in all of them … Somehow these chapels ought to be made very personal and intimate, so that they would draw people there for private devotions just by the force of their intimate quality.

Cram singled out the Chapel of St. Boniface as “very dead and lifeless,” recommending color and gold for the reredos. For the Chapel of St. Martin, his own design, he recommended painting the three tympana of the arcade in gold and “a very dark greenish blue with the fleur-de-lis gilded and burnished.”

No action was taken on Cram’s proposals for those two chapels. But could the painted stones in the niche be a response to Cram’s observations, and likewise the polychrome shields in the Baptistery? It is inconceivable that paint could have been applied to anything in the Cathedral without the approval of the autocratic Cram.

A final note – You may be wondering what became of the historic stones that were not integrated with the fabric.  For many years, they were displayed rather randomly around the Cathedral – on a ledge here, in a corner there. On December 18, 2001, a fire devastated the gift shop that then occupied the unfinished north transept. Firefighters successfully contained the blaze, but ash and soot coated virtually every surface of the Cathedral’s interior. To facilitate cleaning and restoration, the historic stones were taken to the crypt, along with most of the artwork and other movable objects. 

There the stones remain to this day. Should the Cathedral ever revive the construction of the western towers, I would hope there might be some consideration of the original intent of integrating them with the fabric.

My sincere thanks to Dr. David Morrison, Worcester Cathedral Librarian, for his invaluable assistance with the research for this article. Dr. Morrison is the current successor to James Maurice Wilson (1836-1931), Worcester Cathedral’s first librarian and the same Canon Wilson who enabled Canon Douglas to obtain the Worcester stones. 

Thanks as well to Wayne Kempton, diocesan archivist, for providing a complete list of historic stones and granting me access to the papers of the Committee on the Fabric. Also, to Jim Patterson, the Cathedral’s facilities director, for confirming the current location of the historic stones.

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SOURCES

Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Committee on the Fabric, Minutes 1918-1925 ● Hall, Edward Hagaman. Guide to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (4^th edition, 1924). ● Milburn, R.L.P. The Pictorial History of Worcester Cathedral (London: Pitkin Pictorials, c. 1960). ● Suter, John W. Life and Letters of William Reed Huntington: Champion of Unity (New York: Century Co., 1925) ● Worcester Cathedral website https://www.worcestercathedral.org.uk/  

Solemn ceremonies have always accompanied the laying of a cornerstone. In ancient cultures, the ceremony might involve the sacrifice of animals or even humans. In early Christian churches, there was often a cavity within the stone to preserve relics of saints and martyrs. 

In the image above, St. Ambrose lays the cornerstone of the fourth-century Basilica of Martyrs in Milan, now known as the Basilica di Sant’ Ambrogio. St. Augustine recounts how Ambrose translated the relics of local martyrs to the new basilica (Confessions IX.7).

Sealed inside a copper box within the Cathedral’s cornerstone is a kind of relic – a fragment of stone or, more likely, Spanish brick, a remnant of the church where the Christian faith was first practiced in the Americas, built by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1494. 

This post tells the story of how and why this object came to rest in the Cathedral’s cornerstone, followed by thoughts on how we in the 21^st century might regard this “relic.”

La Isabela

The fragment within the  cornerstone dates from the second and longest of Columbus’s four transatlantic voyages (1493-96), when he traveled to what is now Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles – all the while believing he was somewhere in Asia. He set out from Cadiz in September 1493 with a fleet of seventeen ships bearing more than a thousand crew along with building materials, provisions and horses. With colored pennants streaming from their masts, the galleons and caravels in the argosy would have been a stirring sight – unless you were one of the Jews whose property had been confiscated by the crown and mortgaged to fund the voyage.

Arriving at the north coast of the island of Hispaniola in late November 1493, Columbus found the small fort he had built on his first voyage burned to the ground and its occupants vanished. Sailing eastward along the coast, he came upon a site with a suitable harbor, a freshwater lake fed by neighboring mangrove swamps, fertile soil, and an abundance of timber. He set about building a fort, a church, a storehouse for provisions, huts for settlers and a stone house for himself. He named the new settlement La Isabela after the Queen of Castille. 

The church – La Iglesia de Santa Maria de la Incarnación – celebrated its first mass on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1494. Archaeological excavations conducted in the 1980s determined that the church was a “simple, single-naved, monastic-style church with a bell tower, campanario, on one side, a pattern that was to become standard throughout the Spanish frontier mission territories of the sixteenth century.” 

The church was approximately fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. The east and west facades were of limestone, the walls of tapia valenciana – rammed earth reinforced with brick, a common building material of southern Spain. The roof was thatched rather than tiled. Today, only the church’s foundations survive.

La Isabela lasted for only a few tumultuous years before it was abandoned, having been decimated by disease, famine, mutiny, quarrels among settlers and battles with the Indigenous Taínos. The surviving settlers relocated to Santo Domingo. The site remained deserted for the next four centuries and acquired a reputation for being haunted. Samuel Hazard, a historian of Santo Domingo, wrote about his visit to the site in 1872:

There was absolutely nothing to repay me for my trouble, the place possessing no natural beauty and the few ruins remaining having no particular form or meaning, being mostly covered with running vines and vegetation. With much difficulty can be made out where has originally run a small village street.

The USS Enterprise Expedition

Hazard’s book, Santo Domingo, Past and Present, was read by George Partridge Colvocoresses, a lieutenant aboard the sloop-of-war USS Enterprise as it cruised off the coast of Santo Domingo in the spring of 1891. As he recounts in his handwritten memoir:

I had seen a notice in a newspaper that it was proposed to send an expedition to the West Indies for the purpose of visiting the places associated with the voyages of Columbus and collecting any relics that might be found. This was to be done by the Latin-American Dept. of the Columbian Exposition, then preparing in Chicago for the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. Realizing that we were quite near Isabella, I suggested to the Capt. that I be permitted to explore that region for our own satisfaction, and that so doing might possibly forestall the Enterprise having to return for that purpose. Capt. C. cordially approved.

Lt. Colvocoresses conducted an examination of the ruins of La Isabela on May 14-16, 1891, accompanied by a surgeon, a cadet, two volunteers from the Enterprise, and a local wood-cutter who was familiar with the site. The following are excerpts from the report that he submitted to the ship’s commander:

Tradition points to this little plateau as the site of the ancient city and here we found scattered at intervals various small ill-defined heaps of stones, remnants of walls built of small unhewn stones, evidently laid in mortar, pieces of old tiles and potsherds, some of the latter glazed, and fragments of broad, roughly-made bricks. There was a half-dozen or more blocks of dressed limestone that may have been part of the walls of buildings somewhat finished and permanent in character. The trees, matted roots and trailing vines overspread the ground and rendered progress slightly difficult. 

It should be stated that the piles of stones that we saw convey very little idea of the forms of the structures to which they belonged and give no indication of their uses.

We overturned all the cut blocks of stone and examined them carefully in the hope of finding some marks or dates, but without success … Of the surface remains at Isabella, it is our opinion that there is nothing of sufficient interest to be removed, except, perhaps, the few blocks of cut limestone, and there is nothing that would convey an idea of the architecture and workmanship of the buildings erected by the first settlers.

The artifacts that the expedition took from the site were not exhibited at the Columbian Exposition. How did one of them make its way to the Cathedral?

Lt. Colvocoresses’s report notes that two volunteers from the Enterprise accompanied him. One of them was Lieutenant Walter McLean. Lt. McLean had a brother in New York City, Malcolm McLean, a medical doctor. Dr. McLean was a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, serving as its senior warden. Both brothers are identified as donors of the fragment in the available documentation. I would speculate that while Lt. McLean was assisting at La Isabela, he collected a few stones as souvenirs and later shared one with his brother, who then gifted it to the Cathedral. 

Are we sure that the stone is really from the church and not another building at La Isabela? We are not. The Colvocoresses report makes clear that the expedition could not distinguish specific building types. The details about the church were discovered decades later through meticulous archaeological investigation. 

The Columbus Quadricentennial

When the Cathedral’s cornerstone was laid on December 27, 1892, only three months had passed since the October 12 kick-off of the year-long commemoration of the quadricentennial of Columbus’s first voyage. The exuberant celebration was impossible for New Yorkers to avoid, the jubilee so ubiquitous that it was probably inevitable that it would impinge upon the cornerstone ceremony. 

Every New Yorker attending the ceremony would have seen the patriotic banners hanging throughout the city or watched one of the parades, or enjoyed one of the musical events, such as the cantata “The Triumph of Columbus” at Carnegie Hall. They would have read flowery editorials in their newspapers and listened to bombastic oratory lionizing Columbus as the embodiment of the American spirit of quest and boldness.

Two views Columbus from New York’s 1892 Columbus celebration. Left: Columbus the great Italian navigator atop a 60-foot column in (where else?) Columbus Circle. Marble. Artist: Gaetano Russo, 1892. Photo: Brecht Bug via Flickr. Right: Columbus the apostle of Spanish Catholicism in Central Park. Bronze. Artist: Jerionimo Sunol, 1892. Photo: NYC Dept. of Parks.

Churchgoers would have heard sermons hailing the Genoese navigator as the apostle who first planted the cross of Christianity in the New World. American Catholics even launched a short-lived campaign for canonization. Rabbis delivered their own laudatory sermons, tactfully sidestepping the quadricentennial of another historic event initiated by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela – the Alhambra Decree of 1492 that expelled the Jews from Spain. 

While New York made merry, Chicago was constructing the Columbian Exposition of 1893, a panorama of America’s progress in science and technology. The exposition’s Great White City was the dawn’s early light of what would come to be known as “the American Century,” when the United States would take its place as a world power on an equal footing with the mighty colonial empires of Europe.

Goodbye Columbus

Brilliant navigator, bold visionary, apostle of Christian civilization – that was the prevailing view of Columbus at the time the Cathedral’s cornerstone was laid. Those present at the cornerstone ceremony would have shared this view and revered the Isabela stone as a kind of relic, for Columbus himself might have touched it.

This bygone view of Columbus persisted through much of the next century. You can see it expressed in the three places his image appears in the Cathedral, all dating from the first half of the twentieth century. You will find him in the Historical Parapet, flanked incongruously by two martyrs of the English Reformation, John Wycliffe and Thomas Cranmer. He appears again in a window in the Chapel of St. James, and in the window of the nave bay devoted to American history (not pictured here).

By the time the Columbian quincentennial arrived in the postcolonial world of 1992, images like the one above had become quaint. A new generation of historians was examining the Columbus narrative from the perspective of the Indigenous peoples that he encountered. In this view, Columbus was merely the first in a series of European adventurers who inflicted slavery, brutal exploitation, and genocidal epidemics on the native peoples of the Americas, facilitated in no small part by the priests and friars who accompanied them.

With Columbus deposed from his saintly niche, how might we regard the Isabela stone today?

We might start by considering why Bishop Potter decided to place it in the cornerstone. Was it merely to capitalize on the public interest in the Columbus quadricentennial? While that may have been a factor, there is good reason to that believe that Potter had a more substantive purpose, one that had nothing to do with the glorification of Columbus himself.

From the time that he revived his predecessor’s intention to build a great cathedral in New York, Bishop Potter sought to distinguish it from the cathedrals of the Old World. He was emphatic that it should have a distinctly American character. By placing a stone from the first church in the Americas within the cornerstone, Potter was branding St. John the Divine as an American cathedral, with core values both Christian and American.

Potter was a proponent of the American value of inclusiveness, as evidenced by his long involvement with the settlement house movement that assisted recently-arrived immigrants. In his 1887 “Letter to the Citizens of New York,” he set forth his conviction that the proposed cathedral should be “a people’s church …. [whose] welcome would be for all men of whatsoever fellowship.” As an “exponent of those great religious ideas in which the foundations of the Republic were laid,” its pulpit would be open to “the strongest and most helpful minds of the age.” 

The decision to build seven chapels where immigrants could worship in their native tongues would further distinguish St. John the Divine from Old World cathedrals. Four decades later, the windows of the nave would feature representatives of the trades and professions that funded the construction of the bays rather than the lives of the saints to whom they are dedicated, as was the medieval custom. The nave’s windows thus reflect the bedrock American belief in the dignity of labor and the worth of the common man and woman. 

The day after the cornerstone was laid, the New York Times editorialized:

A building on this scale is no longer the work of a denomination; the Episcopalians are merely the initiatory force. It appeals to the whole city, without distinction of sect or religion; nay, to the whole country, for its completion in the most beautiful and splendid way reflects glory on every person who is proud to call himself an American.

Perhaps we should regard the remnant within the cornerstone not as a relic, but rather, a seed that planted in the soil of the Americas yielded a bounty far different from what the Europeans who planted it ever imagined.

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Sources

Carletta, David M. “The Triumph of American Spectacle: New York City’s 1892 Columbian Celebration” in Material Culture (Spring, 2008). ● Colvocoresses, George Partridge. The Personal Recollections of George P. Colvocoresses, v. 1, 1847-1907. Handwritten manuscript accessed via the Norwich University Archives Digital Collection. ● Deagan, Kathleen and Jose Maria Cruxent. Columbus’s Outpost Among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela 1493-1498 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). ● Moody, Michael. “Isabela Revisited” in Journal of Popular Culture (Fall, 1989). ● Moody, Michael. “Isabela Revisited” in Journal of Popular Culture (Fall, 1989). ● Ober, Frederick A. In the Wake of Columbus (Boston: D. Lothrop Co., 1893). ● “Report of Lieutenant George P. Colvocoresses to Commander G.A. Converse, USS Enterprise” in Thacher, John Boyd, Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Work, His Remains” (New York: Putnam, 1903). ● U.S. Naval History & Heritage Command. “USS Enterprise” at https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/alphabetical-listing/e/uss-enterprise–1877-1909-0.html ● “New cathedral planned: Bishop Potter asks the city for aid,” New York Times (June 2, 1887). ● “From the First Church,” New York Times (December 23, 1892).