Now that the history has been prominently displayed in the church, officials are looking to discover more with the help from those around the community. St Luke’s Rev. Luke Fodor stated that the church has recently been doing some other work to uncover pieces of history from around the Jamestown area. Fodor stated that this involved going into the church’s vault to look through some of the historical records and items that are currently stored. During the searches through the vault the team would discover some strange sketches of stained glass windows that immediately piqued everyone’s interest, as none of these windows were ever put into the church to anybody’s knowledge, according to Fodor.

“We know that most of the windows that are in the church are not the original windows, they were more simplistic geometric images. At various points in history they did little fundraisers, or someone would want to dedicate something in honor of a loved one, so there’s the whole history of these windows coming in phases,” said Fodor. “And as we were kind of pondering ‘I wonder why they didn’t do these’, we found another one that was never done.”

Fodor stated that, once the group had inspected the church’s building, two in particular stuck out. Most of the church’s windows are a triptych, being made up of one main part and two central wings, according to Fodor. Fodor stated that one window, which depicts Jesus before Pilate, differs. This image is just the one central image with interesting geometric designs around the edges. The other window is in the Baptistery near the organ, and also differs in the same ways as the other. Fodor had initially assumed that these differences had to do with the chronological order that the windows had been installed in, but upon finding the drawings the team realized that these windows bore a strong resemblance to the sketches.

Upon looking at the sketches closer, the team would notice that the year of creation was labeled as 1929, giving Fodor a strong hypothesis on the existence of the sketches.

“The market crash. So someone had donated money for the first window, and then they had made up a plan like ‘let’s think about replacing all of the windows’,” said Fodor. “The market conditions made it probably impossible. So they took those pictures and stuck them in the vault and never talked about it again.”

It would not be until years later in 1962, once market conditions had recovered, that the project would be picked back up by former St. Luke’s Rev. George F. O’Pray. O’Pray initially began as the church’s rector in 1951, serving in the position until being superseded by Rev. Richard Fenn in 1977. Though O’Pray would revise the window replacement project he was likely unaware of the existing sketches, as those sketches had been created during the first year of the previous rector, Lewis E. Ward. Due to this, O’Pray had different designs created, leaving the 1929 ones from J&R Lamb behind to be forgotten.

“By that point he had different designs in mind about what he was hoping to do,” said Fodor. “We thought, ‘Well, this is original artwork, and it was before computers drew them, and all drawn by hand, we should display these.’ So Jim Colby was an exhibitor over at JCC and so I asked him to help me. So we’ve just installed them recently and then, just yesterday, we got a new kind of light installed to make it easier to see them on the staircase.”

Now that this piece of Jamestown and St. Luke’s history has been unveiled, the church is calling for the help of interested community members to continue to uncover more. With the large number of events and weddings that have been happening for decades at the church, Fodor hopes that somebody is able to find pictures, or tell stories, about the windows prior to the 1960s. For more information contact 716-483-6405.