Jeanne Gettle has spent many Christmases sitting in the hand-carved oak pews at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Abingdon, taken by the array of red and blue flecks of light emanating from the stained-glass windows.
"Every time I see the windows I see something new," said Gettle, a church member from Edgewood. "I've never seen anything like them. They give me such a sense of peace."
Many Harford County churches are adorned with stained-glass windows, but maintenance and preservation costs have prompted many newer churches, or churches that replace windows, to move toward contemporary designs rather than the ornate 19th-century windows.
"Stained glass is handcrafted the same today as it was a thousand years ago," said James Hauser, vice president of Willet Hauser Architectural Glass in Philadelphia. "But design styles have changed significantly and are tied into labor costs. A man doesn't earn 22 cents an hour anymore."
Yet some Harford churches, such as St. Mary's, carry on with their traditional windows. The glass works at St. Mary's are regarded as the rarest in the county. They are the only complete set of windows in the nation designed by William Butterfield, one of the most important English architects of the Gothic Revival movement.
Shortly after construction of the church began in 1848, the Rev. William Francis Brand, the founder of St. Mary's, commissioned Butterfield, a longtime friend, to design 15 windows.
The precise dates of the windows' creation are unknown because a fire in St. Mary's rectory destroyed church records. But church members know that the Gibbs Studio in London created them sometime between 1850 and 1900. During that span, the studio built the windows gradually, as donors stepped forward to pay for them. An additional window, depicting St. Michael, was a gift of appreciation to the church from Gibbs Studio.
"Stained-glass windows were originally meant to tell stories to people who could not read about the birth and death of the Messiah," said the Rev. Bill Smith, the rector at St. Mary's, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
The Butterfield pieces depict the Virgin Mary and tell the story of the life of Jesus.
The first set of the windows was impounded in New York City for duty tax. Members of St. Mary's parish lobbied the federal government and a law was passed allowing church art to enter the country as fine art and be exempt from duty taxes.
