June 25th: More Pieces of the Past

St. Matthias’ was officially founded as a mission of St. George’s, Place du Canada, in 1873, which means our community is 150 this year! For the next 12 months, we’ll be diving into the archives to shine the spotlight on particularly interesting parts of our history.

Fr. Patrick celebrating a baptism – and, if you look behind him, the Memorial Chapel’s altar.

In March of this year, we considered a letter from a mysterious “John,” who detailed several physical remnants of the original church persisting to the new 1912 building. One of John’s pieces was the Memorial Chapel altar.

John’s letter says that “the altar in the North Transept came from the old church and was stored down in the furnace room of the present building until Canon Oliver found it there after the transept was built and put it back in use.” But was he right?

We can confirm that the altar was from the original wood church; the parish history composed in 1935 tells us that the “Memorial Chapel is a symbol of life through the ages, for it enshrines many memorials and a link with the past in the oak Altar, which originally was used in the old Church.” Although we don’t have documentation about the building and ornamentation of the 1875 building, the earliest photos we have show the altar already installed – if you look closely! The compilers of the 1935 history called the altar “the shrine of the old Church in the new.” This choice is in line with the Memorial Chapel’s intended purpose: to commemorate all the lives that contributed to making St. Matthias’ into a place people could come home to. Although today we tend to think of it as a War Memorial Chapel because of the presence of so much military history, the altar is one of several parts of the chapel that retain their original, broader purpose.

So much for John’s first claim. For the second, while it is possible that the altar was stored in the furnace room, John missed a crucial part of the altar’s history. If you take a look at this image from April 1912, taken shortly before the first service in the new church, you can see that the altar size just doesn’t look right. Now, our current chancel is decorated, where this one is quite bare, and the beautiful reredos and rood curtains certainly make the space feel a bit cozier. But the real reason this altar looks so out of place is that it is small – too small, in fact, for the size of the new building’s chancel. For almost two decades, the old church’s altar served as the new church’s altar as well; it was only replaced by our current altar in 1930.

The current altar was a gift from John C. Newman and his wife, in memory of the late Rev. Edward Bushell; the parish as a whole dedicated a large memorial tablet to the late rector. It was at that point, we have good reason to believe, that the smaller altar was moved to the North Transept, which was then embarking on its five-year decoration phase, which would be completed in 1935, except for a reredos, which would not be installed until 1960. The decoration of the Memorial Chapel deserves a post of its own! For the present, we can say that if this little altar ever did languish in a furnace room, it was not very long before it again served its community as it had always been intended to, and as it continues to this day.