Tower restoration project at Kingston church has parishioner calling on governments to protect heritage churches
For 180 years, St. Mark’s Anglican Church has loomed over the village of Barriefield in east Kingston, Ont. —distinguished by its tall square tower that has made the Gothic Revival building a local landmark, known to residents as the “church on the hill.”
Like many heritage churches across the country, St. Mark’s faces an expensive challenge in trying to preserve its aging building. The congregation is currently seeking to raise $2.5 million for a tower restoration project, after wardens observed signs of deterioration in the summer of 2022—with mortar and small pieces of stone threatening to fall from all levels of the tower, particularly during freeze-thaw cycles in the spring and fall.
Following a congregational meeting on Oct. 16, 2022, St. Mark’s launched a fundraising campaign to restore the tower. As of Oct. 10, 2024, parishioners had raised $235,000 towards their goal. Donations to the tower repair fund can be made at stmarksbarriefield.com/give.
Pierre du Prey, a retired art history professor at Queen’s University, is a Barriefield resident and St. Mark’s parishioner. He calls the church a symbol of Kingston East. Its tower is the highest point in the village, visible from the Cataraqui River and LaSalle Causeway, local landmarks. “It just calls people from afar,” Du Prey says, adding that the church “seems to have a gravitational pull on people to come and worship here.”
As of mid-October, however, the church had removed the four pinnacles from the top of the tower to preserve the integrity of the overall structure. The remainder of 2024 was set to include localized repairs to the tower roof to prevent water from entering, as well as installing crack gauges to identify any further deterioration.
In its December 2023 status report, the church’s tower restoration committee said on the basis of investigations, it had concluded that given the level of internal and external deterioration of the tower, any long-term solution would require “the complete deconstruction and reconstruction of a significant portion of the tower structure.” It said this work would “ideally” be completed in the next five to six years.
The Rev. Sandra Hounsell-Drover, rector of St. Mark’s, says scaffolding has been set up around the front of the church because the tower is “literally falling down. The rest of the building, as far as I know, is in good shape, as much as any limestone building from 1843 can be considered in good shape.”
With St. Mark’s among many endangered churches across Canada, du Prey would like to see greater government support to preserve the country’s architectural heritage, as there is, he says, in France among other countries.
All churches in France built before 1905 are publicly owned. The French state owns cathedrals and local parish councils own churches built before 1905. Dioceses own churches built after 1905, the only church buildings that fall outside of public ownership.
The national government is responsible for maintenance of historic cathedrals, directly funding the preservation of architectural jewels such as Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. However, it does not provide funding to tens of thousands of smaller churches, particularly rural chapels.
Even so, Du Prey says France is better at funding its religious buildings than Canada, where religious organizations own all places of worship and are struggling to pay for upkeep in the face of dwindling congregations.
“Do we want a countryside full of ruins, one church after another, of the various denominations—and that includes mosques and that includes synagogues and everything in between—all going to pot and falling to bits, because the powers that be won’t allow themselves to think of this question of what is heritage more broadly?” Du Prey asks.
“These things were meaningful in the past and they are meaningful in the present. If they disappear … it’s gone forever. You’ll never get that back.”
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St. Mark’s predates the Anglican diocese of Ontario itself. Kingston’s second-oldest Anglican church still in use after St. George’s Cathedral, it was the first church to be consecrated after the creation of the diocese in 1862.
In 1843, a committee of 13 men met at the Pittsburgh Inn in Barriefield to organize the construction of a new Anglican church. Members included chairman John Marks, justice of the peace and warden for Midland District, who donated an acre of his farmland for the building site; and secretary Edward Barker, founder and editor of the British Whig newspaper which later became the Kingston Whig-Standard.
Constructed from limestone, St. Mark’s held its first worship service on July 7, 1844. Within several years it had a Sunday school, choir and full-time priest. Its first rector was the Rev. John Pope, who is buried underneath the church along with Marks. “We’re the only Anglican church that has a Pope buried in its basement,” Hounsell-Drover jokes.
Bishop John Lewis, the first bishop of Ontario, consecrated St. Mark’s in 1862 as one of his first official acts. The Book of Common Prayer states that churches should only be consecrated “when the land and buildings are free from debt and there is reason to believe that the building will be used for worship in perpetuity.” In his book Courage, Faith and Love: The History of St. Mark’s Church, historian William J. Patterson writes that although vestry minutes make no mention of the consecration, “it was an important moment in the life of the parish because it demonstrated that St. Mark’s was no longer dependent on outside funds, but was financially secure and out of debt.”
In 1897, E.J.B. Pense, publisher of the British Whig and Barker’s grandson, in tribute to his late wife paid for a major expansion and renovation of the church—replacing its original sanctuary with a larger chancel and oak furnishings that included a new altar, prayer desks, pulpit and choir stalls.
A large stained-glass window in the chancel depicts women feeding, clothing and providing water to others—a reference to the words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink… Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.”
Hounsell-Drover says the stained-glass window is a reminder of “who we as people of faith are called to be and to do—to clothe, to feed, to give water to the thirsty.” Du Prey notes the striking effect of sunlight shining through the window during morning services. “When you come up the hill for the 8:30 service, often Rev. Sandra will have the door open and you’ll see the light flooding out of the church from this window,” he says. “It’s just a call to worship.”
The side wall of the chancel includes a large plaster bas-relief of an angel and three cherubs. The origins of the bas-relief remain a mystery: Patterson, in his research into St. Mark’s, was unable to find any church documents identifying who paid for the art, who designed it, or where it was produced. “We like to think the angel fluttered down from on high,” du Prey says.
On a typical Sunday, 50 to 60 people will worship at St. Mark’s, Hounsell-Drover says. Many Barriefield residents are retired, which is reflected in the large number of seniors in the congregation. “Our congregation has grown in the last year, even though we’ve had a lot of deaths … People who get to a certain point of their life and want to reconnect or connect for the first time with church find their way here and get involved,” the rector says.
“Being part of the spiritual journey of people who are in their senior years is quite remarkable,” she adds. “Just being able to be a part of that and watch it unfold and knowing how alive the spirit is, and to know that God has entrusted me with this group of people to lead them through this stage of their life, is just absolute joy.”
Given its close proximity to the Canadian military base in Kingston, the congregation at St. Mark’s includes several active-duty members of the military. Hounsell-Drover, who took over as rector in September 2020, says her second Remembrance Day service was the largest service the church held that year, with many uniforms and medals visible. “It was phenomenal the number of people we had in church, veterans from nonagenarians to RMC [Royal Military College] cadets and all ages in between,” she says.
Parish life includes activities virtually every day, such as a men’s fellowship group, Anglican Church Women, a veteran support Bible group and an open group called Seniors Having Fun in which retirees play cards, games and puzzles. Occasionally the church hosts guest speakers, such as a police officer who spoke on scams targeting seniors and a lawyer who discussed estate planning.
In addition, St. Mark’s has a Sunday school and confirmation program and hosts youth groups. The congregation also does community outreach ministry, including food drives multiple times per year for the local food bank. But Hounsell-Drover says that all the fundraising St. Mark’s does and all the grants it apply for go into the tower restoration project.
“This congregation feels more tied to the richness of the building than any other congregation I’ve had,” Hounsell-Drover says.
“If this building ceased to exist, I don’t think this congregation would exist. This congregation is not going to go meet in a school library,” she says. “The world and our community need to be fed, but we also need this building to be able to continue to feed well.”
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Funds that St. Mark’s has raised for the tower restoration project include a $10,000 grant from the Anglican Foundation of Canada. Nevertheless, the parish is less than 10 per cent of the way to reaching its $2.5-million target.
Du Prey laments the lack of support by governments in Canada for preserving historic religious buildings. “Governments regard church property as denominational, as they are, and therefore out of bounds, because they say to themselves, ‘Well, if I give money to you, the Anglicans, then I’ve got to give just as much money to the synagogue, to the mosque, to the Congregational church, the Baptist, etc.’”
“The responsibility then falls squarely on the shoulders of the various churches,” he says. “The parishes themselves, the denominations, are faced with having to come up with money. There is no program whereby people in the nation as a whole or provincially—or both, preferably—say, ‘Hey, St. Mark’s Barriefield Church and tower… is worthy of preservation. It’s 1843 architect-designed, Gothic revival, local stone. This is something that we don’t want to lose.”
There is a strong contrast between the way governments preserve secular heritage buildings, du Prey says, and their lack of support for religious heritage buildings.
In Kingston, for example, the federal and provincial governments have spent money to repair Fort Henry, a military fortification built during the War of 1812 and national historic site of Canada. The federal government has also provided funds to maintain the Rideau Canal system, including the Kingston Mills lock.
In Ottawa, the Canadian government is spending more than $4 billion to restore and modernize the Centre Block, the main building of Parliament, including protecting the structure from earthquakes and refurbishing its windows. The government website calls the Centre Block renovation “the largest, most complex project to rehabilitate a heritage building ever in Canada.”
Du Prey says this is all money well spent. But he’d like to see similar efforts to save religious buildings. Aside from grants from the Anglican Foundation and the Pittsburgh Community Benefit Fund—which supports the former Pittsburgh Township, encompassing the area of Kingston located east of the LaSalle Causeway including Barriefield—the St. Mark’s tower restoration project must rely entirely on fundraising from the congregation’s own members.
Du Prey points to St. Anne’s Anglican Church in Toronto as a warning of what is at risk for churches that cannot afford needed repairs. A June 9 fire destroyed St. Anne’s, a unique Byzantine Revival-style church, along with irreplaceable artwork that included the only known religious art by members of the Group of Seven.
Compared to Canada, du Prey finds in France and Russia examples of policies in which the government directly preserves religious buildings as part of the nation’s cultural heritage. “The French have a terrific policy, and there couldn’t be a more anti-clerical country,” he says. “It’s baked into the French constitution. There church and state are absolutely separated, yet they realize that these buildings are part of their heritage.”
Even in the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule, du Prey says, the government restored Pavlovsk Palace, an 18th-century Russian imperial residence complete with chapel, after it was burned down to a hollow shell by retreating Nazi armies during the Second World War.
“The palaces of the czars—you’d think [the Soviet government] would’ve turned and said, ‘Good riddance. To hell with all that stuff. It’s rubbish because it had to do with capitalist and imperialist society.’ No, [they recognized that] it was the people that had built it,” du Prey says.
“It was the craftsmen. It was the workers who were responsible for bringing this work of art, be it sculpture, be it painting, stained glass, architecture, into being. And therefore, it is valuable to all of us because it is representative of [us] as a culture, and we should reach out and include that within what we call heritage and not just draw the line.”
The situation in the United Kingdom is slightly more complicated, he says, with different groups raising funds to preserve churches. One of the most prominent is the Churches Conservation Trust, a registered charity founded in 1969 as the Redundant Churches Fund, which cares for more than 350 historic churches the Church of England has transferred into its care.
Another registered charity, the Church Commissioners for England, was established in 1948 and administers the Church of England’s property assets. “The Anglicans in the U.K. have over the course of centuries, accumulated so much wealth in the Church Commissioners that they have monies that they can dispose of, whereas we were lucky to get $10,000 from the Anglican Foundation,” du Prey says.
What du Prey sees in the U.K. is “a policy, even when the parishes are tiny, of preserving these things because of the value that they have to the landscape to society and this way in which they represent the work of the culture as a whole. It’s not just Anglicans that built this. It’s people that built this, that designed this, that cherish this, that paid for this.
“That’s what we’re looking at here. And surely governments should celebrate not just the present, but what went on in their past.”
