A Breakthrough in Fancy Glass

Our "Fancy Glass"

For weeks now in the excavation, we've been finding piece after piece of what we've come to call "fancy glass" in Feature 1 and, more recently, Feature 3. Now, thanks to the incredible internet sleuthing skills of Bill, we may know what these glass pieces were and what they looked like when intact.

Bill found an image of a stencil-painted church window glass on the website of David Wixon and Associates, a stained glass studio in Illinois. The glass comes from the Riverside Presbyterian Church in Riverside, Illinois, and dates to the 1880s.

Stencil painted glass, c. 1880s

The similarities are striking. Furthermore, we know from this photograph of St. Mark's, taken c. 1890-1910, that the church had diamond-shaped panes.

Here's a close-up:


Did the fancy glass come from these windows, or might it have been part of the small window at the front of the church? What company produced the stencils, and did they have a range of different patterns? Was the stenciled glass original to St. Mark's or was it added later? Did it end up in the ground when St. Mark's Church was removed from the site in 1916 or was it replaced earlier in the church's history?

These questions remain to be answered, but this is definitely a major breakthrough in our reconstruction of St. Mark's Church. Furthermore, it suggests that the levels of Feature 1 and Feature 3 in which we found the fancy glass date from the time of St. Mark's Church (as we suspected).