Church’s stained-glass window lovingly redone
STERLING» The four-year process of restoring the Prince of Peace narthex window is finished.
Craftsmen from Wattle and Daub Contractors of Fort Collins put the finishing touches on the half-century-old stained-glass window earlier this week and removed the scaffolding, revealing the glistening, refurbished glass and restored mullions and tracery.
The project, which cost nearly $150,000, was undertaken in 2013. Years before that, church members had noticed the window had been ravaged by time; the woodwork was badly rotted in some places, and some of the windowpanes had begun to pop out of their leading.
“It was settling, bulging and sagging from the aging process,” said Al Peltzer, who spearheaded the fundraising effort. “In some cases, the pieces of stained glass were actually falling out.”
The church retained Wattle and Daub Contractors, which specializes in restoration work, and scaffolding first went up in October 2013 so a laser scanning process could create a three-dimensional image to help analyze the window’s condition and identify the amount of bowing that needed to be corrected. The work was funded with a matching grant from the Colorado Historical Fund.
A second grant funded removal of the window in 2015 and evaluation of the work needed to repair and replace the crumbling wooden tracery that held the panels of stained glass, and a third grant was secured for the reconstruction phase, which included reinstallation of the twostory window.
Andy Carlson, a partner in Wattle and Daub, explained that the framework consists of three layers: an outer layer that is painted and holds the glass in place from the outside, a middle layer that frames the window glass, and an inner layer that holds the glass in place from the inside. Carlson said his craftsmen were able to salvage the interior layer of the tracery — the elaborately carved wooden framework in the upper portions of the window — and all of the woodwork in the lower mullions.
The outer and middle layers of the tracery, however, had to be completely replaced. The outer layer was machine-cut out of Honduran mahogany by the Kingsland Architectural Millwork in Norfolk, Conn. The middle layer is plywood because it was more stable than the individual pieces of the original.
“We got some negative feedback when people found out we were having it done by machine because people thought we were replacing hand-cut millwork with machined stuff,” Carlson said. “But the original woodwork was machinecut, too, so we’re replacing it exactly as it was.”
All of the on-site work and the replacement of the framework was covered by matching grants, but the window glass itself was not covered by the grants because of the religious nature of the images. The Prince of Peace congregation had to come up with the $7,600 for that work themselves.
The window glass isn’t actually original to the building. According to a statement issued previously by the church, the stained glass was replaced in 1970 with a commissioned work by renowned regional artisan Carl Reichhardt of Greeley. Reichhardt, who prided himself on creating unique and one-of-a-kind stained glass windows, used Blenko glass, which is made in West Virginia. The Blenko Glass Company has been family-owned and operated since 1893, and was once featured in a PBS series, “Craftsman’s Legacy — The Stained Glassmakers.”
To clean and refurbish the glass, Prince of Peace turned to Ruth Wallach of Laporte, owner of Northern Colorado Stained Glass Supply. Peltzer said Wallach knew Carl Reichhardt and his grandsons, and is very familiar with his work. Wallach also is working on a glass rehabilitation for the First Presbyterian Church in Sterling.
Carlson said his crew will return in the spring to install permanent “storm windows” over the stained glass, primarily to protect it from hail and weather damage.