Let’s start our tour of our building, the former St. Mary’s Catholic Church of Lewiston, with information about its architecture.

LATE GOTHIC REVIVAL ARCHITECTURE:

  • Popular church design through the 1940s
  • Architect Timothy O’Connell
  • Built crypt (basement) 1907
  • Built superstructure 1927

FEATURES:

  • A sense of verticality.
  • Battlements.
  • Buttresses.
  • Decorative brackets.
  • Finials.
  • Foliated ornaments.
  • Hood molding.
  • Pinnacles with crockets.
  • Pointed arches.
  • Quatrefoils.
  • Steeply pitched roof.
  • Trefoils.
  • Towers.
  • Turrets.
  • Wall dormers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Architect Russell Wright described St. Mary’s Church architecture:

•  Refined, somewhat subdued and simplified
•  Perpendicular and rectangular
•  Typical Gothic cruxiform plan with a clerestory-lit center-aisle flanked by nave arcades at the side aisles
•  Quarry-faced ashlar granite from Jay, Maine
•  Main roof is slate tiles; gable style
•  Carved stone trim of limestone
•  Vertical planked doors
•  Foliated capitals

STAINED-GLASS WINDOWS:

  • Stained-glass windows came from the French studio of Maumejean Freres
  • Both Art Nouveau and Art Deco
  • Nave at St. Mary’s contains 13 stained-glass windows at ground level
  • Full-figured saints
  • Highly decorated architectural surround
  • Embellished with painted symbols for that saint’s story
  • Mouth-blown antique glass
  • Multiple panels stacked one above another
  • All glass surfaces are painted and/or stained
  • Symbols in stained-glass windows (dove is the Holy Ghost, purple is royalty, figures above others are important)

Click the link for a PDF version of our PowerPoint about the architecture of St. Mary’s Church.

Architecture of St. Mary’s PDF