New Technology to Restore Historic Church Windows
A Victorian-era problem was met with modern technology solutions due to the deteriorating windows of a church, circa 1870s, in historic downtown Clarksville.
Leaders of the First Presbyterian Church, whose congregation meets in a prominent Gothic Revival building listed on the National Register of Historic Places, discovered that three rosette windows in the church’s bell tower had fallen into a state of disrepair. As happens with such window frames from this era – which were originally crafted of wood, nail and glue construction – the frames had rotted and cracked. This jeopardized the structural integrity of the frames that were designed to hold hand-colored, stenciled glass within their tracery.