Kingston church seeks $2.5 million to save tower; parishioner says governments should be doing more 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, St. Mark’s faces an expensive challenge trying to preserve its aging building. The congregation is seeking to raise $2.5 million for a tower restoration project, after wardens observed signs of deterioration in the summer of 2022. Mortar and small pieces of stone were threatening to fall from all levels, particularly during freeze-thaw cycles in the spring and fall.
Following an Oct. 16, 2022 congregational meeting, St. Mark’s launched a fundraising campaign to restore the tower. As of Oct. 10, 2024, parishioners had raised $235,000.
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 its overall structural integrity. The remainder of 2024 was set to include localized repairs to the tower roof to prevent water entering, as well as installing crack gauges to identify any further deterioration.
In its December 2023 status report, the tower restoration committee said 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.
Scaffolding has been set up around the front because the tower is “literally falling down,” rector the Rev. Sandra Hounsell-Drover says. “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 the 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.
Even so, du Prey says, France is better at funding its religious buildings than Canada, where religious organizations own all places of worship and struggle to pay for upkeep amid 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.”
Kingston’s second-oldest Anglican church still in use after St. George’s Cathedral, St. Mark’s was the first church to be consecrated after the creation of the diocese of Ontario in 1862. The church held its first worship service July 7, 1844. Its first rector, the Rev. John Pope, is buried underneath the building. “We’re the only Anglican church that has a Pope buried in its basement,” Hounsell-Drover jokes.
In 1897, E.J.B. Pense, publisher of the British Whig—later the Kingston Whig-Standard—in tribute to his late wife paid for a major renovation, replacing the church’s original sanctuary with a larger chancel and oak furnishings that included a new altar.
A large stained-glass window in the chancel depicts women feeding, clothing and providing water to others. Hounsell-Drover says the art 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.” The side wall includes a large plaster bas-relief of an angel and three cherubs.
On a typical Sunday, 50 to 60 people worship at St. Mark’s, Hounsell-Drover says. Many Barriefield residents are retired, 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 proximity to the local Canadian military base, St. Mark’s congregation includes several active-duty military members. 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.
In addition to hosting various community group meetings, St. Mark’s does outreach ministry such as food drives. But Hounsell-Drover says all fundraising goes into the tower restoration.
“This congregation feels more tied to the richness of the building than any other congregation I’ve had,” she 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.”
Funds St. Mark’s has raised 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 target.
Du Prey laments the contrast he sees in Canada between the way governments preserve secular heritage buildings 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 a national historic site. In Ottawa, the Canadian government is spending more than $4 billion to restore and modernize the Centre Block, the main building of Parliament.
It’s rare for governments in Canada to fund heritage church restoration (although Quebec’s Religious Heritage Council has funded such work in the province since 1995). Aside from grants from the Anglican Foundation and the Pittsburgh Community Benefit Fund—which supports the former Pittsburgh Township, encompassing Barriefield—the St. Mark’s tower restoration must rely entirely on fundraising from the congregation.
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 by Group of Seven members.
In France, he says, “church and state are absolutely separated, yet they realize that these buildings are part of their heritage.” Even in the Soviet Union, du Prey says, the government restored Pavlovsk Palace, an 18th-century Russian imperial residence complete with chapel, after it was burned down by retreating Nazi armies during the Second World War.
The situation in the United Kingdom is slightly more complicated, he says, with different groups raising funds to preserve churches. The Churches Conservation Trust, a registered charity founded in 1969 as the Redundant Churches Fund, 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.
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. Surely governments should celebrate not just the present, but what went on in their past.”
