Midwest Guest

Old Mission Indian Cemetery in Hessel, Michigan

I spotted this old cemetery tucked behind the Our Lady of the Snows Catholic Church as we were driving through Hessel on the Lake Huron shore in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

The cemetery may date back to the early 1700s and still serves as a burial ground for Ojibwa (or Chippewa) members of the Sault Indian tribe and their families. The Sault tribe numbers about 44,000 members today.

A short item in The Journal of American Folklore from 1950 identified the oldest Indian burial ground in northern Michigan as the Greensky Hill Cemetery of Chippewa Indians between Petoskey and Charlevoix in Michigan's northern Lower Peninsula, and I think it's entirely reasonable to think that this cemetery in Hessel may date from the same period.

The Native American Society for Historic Preservation (NASHP) maintains the cemetery and holds a life lease on the land, although I'm not sure exactly sure how long the "life lease" is in effect as I'm more familiar with the term as applied to housing and individual residents or families.

The burial ground once bore the name of Father Marquette Cemetery, but it reverted back to its original deeded name of Old Mission in 2003.

The cemetery neared capacity with 134 known graves by 2008, and the NASHP initiated volunteer efforts three years earlier, in 2005, to expand the cemetery and add as many as 200 new grave sites and seek funding for the project.

Many of the graves are marked with plain white crosses, many of them without names or other identifying information. Some markers and other engraved stones mark graves, sometimes accompanying the white wooden crosses.

I found one site with the names, birthdates and dates of death for the 42 markers existing and legible as of July 29, 2008.

One grave was even marked with a small "spirit house".

Such structures sit over a grave site, usually covering the length of the grave site and standing about two feet tall.

We saw several more spirit houses in smaller grave yards as we drove throughout the eastern Upper Peninsula, but I couldn't find much information online about the structures.

Sprit houses are common among several tribes. I found an interesting article with many photos of spirit houses in Native American cemeteries in Oklahoma and stories about some common Native American burial traditions and rituals.

They seem to be in keeping with Native American traditions of considering the soul as living on after the death of a person's physical body. The spirit living on becomes an important part of the spiritual forces affecting every aspect of life.

The little houses might protect the body for a short time as relatives and tribe members prepare to bury the body, or it serves as shelter for a restless spirit wandering around after a physical death.

Native American traditions and rituals where relatives and friends buried a body with food and other possessions sometimes led to numerous instances of grave-robbing and desecration done by vandals in hopes of finding valuables. Tribes also express concerns about archeological digs and museum acquisition of bones and other items from Native American graves on the grounds that such activity disrupts the natural cycle of life, death and a spirit's journey after death.

Such concerns led to passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1997 to protect graves and allow tribes an opportunity to see bones and artifacts taken from graves returned to their rightful resting place.

© Dominique King 2014 All rights reserved

Quaker settlement and the Western Yearly Meeting House in Plainfield, Indiana

The Quakers had a surprising (to me at least) presence and influence in Indiana over the years, which I learned about after spotting the historical marker for this Quaker meeting house in Plainfield.

Plainfield can trace its origins to the westward migration of Quakers (or Friends) from eastern and southern states during the early 1800s.

Quaker concern for social justice issues like equality for all brought the Friends to the Territory of Indiana. Baltimore-based Friends listened as President Thomas Jefferson met with members of the Miami and Potawatomi tribes to discuss their concerns with appropriation of their lands as a result of western migration in 1802. The Quakers protested the United States' unjust treatment of the Indians and headed to Indiana to set up demonstration farms and share their knowledge of best farming techniques with the tribes.

More Quakers migrated west after the War of 1812 because they opposed slavery in the south and because of the availability of affordable land in the west.

Many counties in central Indiana like Hendricks County saw Quaker meetings established during the 1820s.

Some of area's first settlers were Quakers who helped establish Plainfield in 1839, naming the town to reflect their "plain" dress and speech.

Quakers established the Indiana Yearly Meeting in 1821. In 1835, as more Quakers moved westward, they established the Western Yearly Meeting to serve Friends in western Indiana and eastern Illinois.

In 1858, the Quakers built this plain brick meeting house along what is now The National Road (or U.S. 40).

Plainfield became home to the Western Yearly Meeting and six hundred Friends reportedly showed up to the first session.

Many of the Friends migrating to Indiana had little or no formal education, but they felt they had a duty to provide a good education for their children. Quaker schools taught students to read, write and cipher.

Friends in Indiana also operated as many as a dozen secondary schools through the nineteenth century like the Central Academy referred to on this historical marker near the Western Yearly Meeting house. The Central Academy operated from 1881-1919 as a high school to prepare children heading to the nearby Quaker-run Earlham College.

Plainfield honors the Quakers' historic concern for education with Plainfield's high school mascot, the Quaker.

You see some of the features of traditional Quaker meeting house design in the Western Yearly Meeting building. Traditional Quaker meeting houses are long rectangular buildings, with one of the long sides serving as the front of the building. There were generally two front entrances with the one on the right serving as an entrance for men and young boys. Women, young children and girls entered the door on the left side.

Friends meet more frequently in their local areas. Yearly Meetings are week-long gatherings drawing members from a wider geographic area and include worship, business meetings, religious contemplation, determining guiding principles for the group, reporting on Friends community efforts and work on social justice issues, and social activities.

The Western Yearly Meeting split over the issue of slavery and the influence of former Methodists who joined the Friends and introduced changes like formal services with hired preachers, hymns and revival meetings that conflicted with traditional Quaker practices.

Some more conservative Quakers did not agree with members who willingly assisted fugitive slaves traveling the Underground Railroad through the area or who joined anti-slavery organizations not related to the Friends, even as most Quakers opposed slavery in principle.  

In 1877, some members established the Western Meeting of (Conservative) Friends. The group disbanded, or was "laid down" in 1962.

The prevalence of Quaker influence in Plainfield faded during the late 1800s as the National Road brought more non-Quaker settlers to the area, but the Western Yearly Meeting house still serves Friends in the area as a place of worship and as an annual meeting place.

Want to learn more about Plainfield? Check out Plainfield (Images of America) by Reann Lydick Poray.

Thanks to the Hendricks County Convention and Visitors Bureau for sponsoring my visit to Hendricks County, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Hendricks County attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

French heritage and St. Louis in Besancon, Indiana

The St. Louis Catholic Church was one of our first stops during a recent road trip along the Lincoln Highway in Indiana, and it turned out to be a great way to learn about the French heritage of the historic settlement of Besancon.

You can see the church with its tall steeple from quite a ways off, making it seem especially impressive given its rural location about 15 miles out of Fort Wayne.

We seem to spend a lot of time in churches and cemeteries when we travel because we're intrigued with the architecture and history of places we visit, so it should surprise no one that we slowed to stop when we spotted St. Louis' tall steeple in the distance shortly after crossing the state line from Ohio into Indiana.

St. Louis sits along a spur called Besancon Road off of Old U.S. 30 through northwestern Indiana. This little side road is part of the Lincoln Highway's original 1913 route that hasn't been subsumed a more modern multi-lane road like U.S. 30. The spur is about a mile long, but the detour is worth taking to see church with its school and cemetery, an abandoned school house and another local cemetery before rejoining the main highway.

As we wandered through the church's cemetery, we learned that many of St. Louis' nineteenth-century parishioners emigrated from the northeastern region of France and Switzerland, naming their new Indiana home for the capital and principal city of the French-Comte region near the Switzerland border.

I found a lot of interesting genealogical information and links out from the St. Louis website that include the cemetery's death records, a list of the origin of the early parishioners' surnames that shows many of them came from northeastern France and Switzerland, and a wealth of other local information from the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana.

French, Swiss and German immigrants first settled the area in the 1840s. They cleared the land, drained a lake and established a thriving farming community in what is now the Maumee River Valley.

The French families established a French American Society in Allen County in 1903, meeting in a saloon near Fort Wayne. The group had about 600 members who paid $1-per-year dues and organized an annual picnic that drew as many as 6,000 people in the early 1900s. The Society changed its name to the Lafayette Legion around the time of World War I and, although it disbanded in 1923, it paid death benefits of $200 to the estates of its members as late as 1947.

St. Louis Besancon Catholic Church began as a small a log building on the site of the present church in 1846. As the community grew, parishioners saw the need for a more permanent building and built it in 1871 with bricks from a kiln that was just across the road from the site.

The church doors were open during our visit, so we were able to step inside to see the high-ceilinged interior. The stained glass windows date from the 1871 construction and bear the names of many of the parish families who donated the money to purchase and install them.

They sealed the brick exterior with a cement-and-mortar mixture, and a 1998 rehab of the building sealed it with cement paint for a bright, creamy white finish.

The church is also restoring many of the grave markers by placing them on concrete foundations.

The church and its cemetery earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.

And so, now you see why churches and cemeteries are often among our most interesting road-trip stops!

Check out The Lincoln Highway Across Indiana (Images of America) by Jan Shupert Arick and the Indiana Lincoln Highway Association or The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate by Michael Wallis to learn more about the Lincoln Highway through Indiana.

© Dominique King 2012 All rights reserved

Michigan Civil War vets spark life-long interest in history for Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Young Bruce Catton, who sat mesmerized by the tales of old Civil War veterans in the small northern Michigan town of Benzonia, Michigan, grew up to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of many popular histories of the War Between the States.

We often visit Benzonia, and once found a particularly tricky geocache in the park where young Bruce played Civil War games with his buddies near the turn of the twentieth century.

I knew about the Benzonia/Catton connection, and with the approach of the Civil War sesquicentennial, I thought it was a good time to share the story.

Congregationalists settle Benzonia, establish school

In 1858, Reverend Charles E. Bailey and four families from a Congregational church in Oberlin, Ohio, arrived in northern Michigan's wilderness to establish a Christian community with a college modeled after Oberlin.

The school began as Grand Traverse College offering classes at someone's home, and later in a two-story frame building in Benzonia.

The school offered college preparatory classes and teacher training, accepting students of both genders and of all races and ethnic origin.

The school started with 13 students in 1860. That number grew to 150 students by 1875, with many graduates becoming teachers in western Michigan's lumbering towns.

In 1891, Grand Traverse College became Benzonia College.

Lumbering declined as the forests disappeared during the late 1800s, farming in the area was generally difficult, and the population declined.

Benzonia College struggled, lacking students or money, and it became a college prep school called Benzonia Academy in 1900.

The Catton family in Benzonia

Bruce Catton was born in Petoskey, Michigan. His family came to Benzonia when his father taught at the school and, in 1906, became principal of the 40-student academy.

In 1909, Benzonia Academy's main campus building burned down, and school officials replaced it with a wooden-frame and brick-veneer building called Mills Cottage. It became the girls' dormitory, central dining hall, and home to Principal Catton's family.

Young Bruce Catton had fond memories of old men with long grey beards and wearing blue uniforms with brass buttons that took center stage each Decoration Day (aka Memorial Day) during his childhood. Catton loved the stories they spun about their Civil War days, and history became alive for him as he listened to their tales.

Catton graduated from Benzonia Academy and attended Oberlin College in 1916. His father remained principal of the academy until 1917.

Benzonia Academy closed after graduating one last class of 10 students in 1918.

Catton leaves Benzonia, finds his voice

Catton left Oberlin College to join the Navy during World War I. He worked as a newspaper reporter at the Cleveland News, the Boston Herald-American, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer before moving to Washington D.C. in the mid-1920s to work for a news syndication service. He worked for the Federal government through World War II as a director of information.

Catton wrote his first book, The War Lords of Washington, in 1948, leaving his bureaucratic job for his new career as an author.

Catton turned to the subject that sparked his imagination as a young boy, writing Mr. Lincoln's Army in 1951. It was the first of his 13 Civil War books.

Catton's next book, A Stillness at Appomattox, explored the final campaign of the war in Virginia. It was his first real commercial success, earning him the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for history.

His lyrical writing and love for telling stories of the privates, rather than the generals or simply regurgitating dry facts and figures, made Catton's histories popular beyond professional historians and academicians.

The rest of the story

Catton helped establish American Heritage magazine in 1954. He became the magazine's senior editor in 1959, remaining there until his 1978 death at his summer home in Frankfort, Michigan. His gravesite is in the Benzonia Township Cemetery.

Catton wrote about his childhood in Benzonia during the 1970s in Waiting for the Morning Train.

Mills Cottage became the Mills Community House and Benzonia Public Library in 1925. It earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

If you're looking for a Wi-Fi connection as you travel in the area, you can sit on the building's spacious front porch and access the library's connection, even when the building isn't open according its website.

For the curious, the geocache we found in the park next to the building where young Bruce played Civil War is no longer there, although it remains one of our more memorable finds. It was a two-stage cache where you solved a math puzzled based on information from an historical marker about the academy. The solution led you to a micro cache hidden on the underside of a piece of tree bark about 3/4 by 1-1/2 inches in size and tacked back on the tree with a small hook.

Looking for other Midwest locations with a Civil War connection? Check out my story, Brake for Civil War history in Indiana, about a marker at the site of a Civil War training camp.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Thompsonville

Helen Steiner Rice: Ohio's "Ambassador of Sunshine"

I remember seeing gift books and greeting cards in card shops bearing the name of Helen Steiner Rice, and I remember seeing a few photos of her as an elderly lady who invariably wore a fancy hat.

I was surprised, though, to see her name on an Ohio historical marker in a Lorain, Ohio, park during our most recent trip along Lake Erie on Ohio's north coast.

Helen Elaine Steiner was born at Lorain on May 19, 1900.

Helen taught religion classes at her local Methodist Church, originally thinking she might like to be a preacher. She liked to write, and had some of her earliest poems published in her school newspapers.

Helen planned to attend Ohio Wesleyan College for a liberal arts degree, study at Ohio State to earn a law degree, and expressed a desire to become a Congresswoman, inspired, no doubt, by the election of Jeannette Rankin of Montana as the first female member of Congress in 1916.

Her father, a railroad worker for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, and Helen gave up her college plans to work at the Lorain Electric Light & Power Company making decorative silk lampshades to support her family after her high school graduation that same year.

Company officials spotted promise in Helen and trained her as a bookkeeper, but her real talent was in marketing and speaking. She eventually became the company's advertising sales manager, which was a rare career for women in the 1920s.

Helen also was the electric company's spokeswoman and chair of Ohio's Women's Public Information Committee of the Electric Light Association. She became a nationally known speaker by age 25 and also used her speaking engagements to advocate improved working conditions and workplace rights for women.

In 1927, Helen started her own speakers bureau called Steiner Service.

Helen spoke at a bankers' convention in June of 1928 where she met Franklin Rice, vice president of Dayton Savings and Trust. She married him on January 30, 1929, and moved into Franklin's grand 14-room house in Dayton.

The stock market crash in October of 1929 cost Franklin his job, as well as his investments.

In 1931, Helen accepted a job with the Gibson Art Company of Cincinnati as a trouble shooter suggesting ways for the company to increase sales in its greeting card division.

Franklin refused to sell his home in Dayton, Ohio, so Helen lived in Cincinnati during the week, commuting back to Dayton on weekends.

Franklin became increasingly depressed about their financial difficulties and committed suicide on October 14, 1932.

Helen worked and lived in Cincinnati after Franklin's death, becoming one of America's leading greeting card writers by 1940.

Helen wrote "When I Must Leave You" when her mother died in 1945. The poem became a popular sympathy card for Gibson, and the company began publishing more of Helen's signed inspirational verses on greeting cards.

The popularity of Helen's inspirational verse soared after 1960 after a reading of one of her poems on the Lawrence Welk Show.

She authored ten books during her lifetime, usually sending her royalties to churches she attended in Lorain and Cincinnati.

Helen retired from full-time work at Gibson in 1971. Her health deteriorated during the 1970s, and she died on April 23, 1981. Her grave is in the Steiner family plot at Elmwood Cemetery in Lorain.

Helen wrote an estimated several million poems during her lifetime. Her poetry continues to sell well, and the foundation she established before her death donates money to a variety of charities helping those in need and the elderly primarily in the Lorain and Cincinnati area.

In 2002, Ohio installed the marker we saw in Lakeview Park commemorating the life of the woman many called the "Poet Laureate of Inspirational Verse" or the "Ambassador of Sunshine".

So, next time I see Helen's name on a sentimental greeting card, book mark, or gift book, I'll have a greater appreciation of her work and life as a tough-minded pioneering businesswoman who liked to wear fancy hats!

Want to learn more? Check out Helen Steiner Rice: Ambassador of Sunshine by Ronald Pollitt and Virginia Wiltse or A Portrait of Helen Steiner Rice by Mary Hilarie Tavenner. Some of the most recent releases of Helen's collected poetry and devotionals include A Celebration of God's Love, A Collection of Joy, A Celebration of Love.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Amherst

Things To Do
Elyria

Basilica of the Sacred Heart is the heart of Indiana's University of Notre Dame campus

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart is the symbolic and literal heart of northern Indiana's University of Notre Dame campus.

The art and architecture of the Gothic Revival church reflects the university's heritage of faith, service, and education. The church is in a central location, and the cross atop its 218-foot-tall tower is the tallest point on campus at 230 feet.

The church's history dates to the 1830s when missionaries built a log cabin to house a chapel at the site. Father Edward Sorin, founder and first president of the University of Notre Dame, built a larger log structure for the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by 1848.

By 1852, the church had double spires built by a local carpenter in exchange for his son's tuition at the school, a carillon, wall murals, and other religious art.

Father Sorin wanted a church modeled after Church of the Gesù in Rome. That church, built in 1568, had a floor plan resembling the Latin cross and housed the tomb of St. Ignatius Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits). The new edifice would echo the Roman church's floor plan and have a mural depicting the life of Loyola.

Father Sorin asked Patrick Keely, the nation's preeminent architect specializing in Catholic churches, to design the new church.

Father Sorin apparently experienced sticker shock when Keely submitted a design with an estimated completion price of $100,000 and enlisted his church's pastor and a religious brother who was an amateur architect and builder to work with Keely to develop a more modest plan.

I can only imagine the opulence of Keely's original plan when viewing the ornate church with its opulent art and architectural details today. You can easily spend a couple of hours there, and volunteer docents, like the Notre Dame alum who answered some of our questions, are often on hand to answer questions for the 50,000 visitors who tour the church each year.

Difficulty in raising money for the scaled-back version of Keely's plan caused delays, and construction stretched from 1868 through 1888.

The church is 175 feet long, 114 feet wide, and has interior ceilings soaring to 60 feet high, but the artwork and architectural detail is equally impressive to the church's size.

The original baptismal dating font from 1871 sits at the front entrance of the church where visitors can pause as they look down the long, central aisle towards the altar.

The French-built main altar made a stop at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia during 1876, winning an award for its design before its installation in Indiana.

Famed Vatican painter Luigi Gregori created 56 wall and ceiling murals and Stations of the Cross for the church over a 17-year period. Gregori's 12th and 13th Stations of the Cross made a stop at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago before their installation in Indiana.

Father Sorin commissioned Carmelite nuns at Le Mans, France, to create 42 stained glass windows. The windows, installed at the church between 1873 and 1888, contain 114 life-size scenes and 106 smaller scenes.

The altar in the Lady Chapel, constructed in 1886, celebrates the 50th anniversary of Father Sorin's 1838 ordination.

Listen for the 23-bell carillon, created in 1852 and brought over from the old Sacred Heart Church. It is reportedly the oldest carillon in North America and is in the church's tower with a seven-ton brass bell dubbed "St. Anthony".

I particularly enjoyed seeing the church's 1978-vinrage Holtkamp organ, which has 2,929 pipes! Unfortunately, we weren't able to hear it during our visit.

A one-seventh scale replica of the French shrine at Lourdes, built in 1896, sits outside of the church, and thousands of people stop at this Grotto each year to pray or light candles.

A 1968 renovation brought the church building into line with liturgical reforms, and a 1988 restoration brought some of the church's most treasured elements back to their original glory.

One of the biggest improvements during the 1980s restoration by Conrad Schmitt Studios involved the church's deteriorating stained glass windows. Visit the firm's site to watch video clips of the careful restoration of the stained glass, involving 116 windows and 1,200 individual panes of glass, and see the difference in the restored glass and its and vibrant colors.

In 1992, Pope John Paul II recognized the church's historical and spiritual significance by designating it as minor basilica.

Be sure to check out my other stories to learn more about the University of Notre Dame's history, art, and architecture.

Back to school at Indiana's University of Notre Dame

Photo Friday: O'Shag Hall at Indiana's University of Notre Dame

Indiana's University of Notre Dame embraces "Touchdown Jesus"

Want to learn more about the Grotto at Notre Dame? Check out A Cave of Candles: The Story Behind Notre Dame's Grotto by Dorothy V. Corson.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
South Bend

Indiana's University of Notre Dame embraces "Touchdown Jesus"

College football fans may catch a glimpse of the University of Notre Dame's "Touchdown Jesus" during televised games, but you must see the huge mosaic created by artist Millard Sheets for the university library's facade to fully appreciate its beauty and meaning.

University officials envisioned the library as a major focal point on campus, but its blank facade presented a bland face to visitors.

Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, a long-time Notre Dame president for whom university officials renamed the library in 1987, even joked that visitors could mistake the blank wall for something like a grain elevator.

The University of Notre Dame traces its history back to Catholic missionaries arriving to Indiana during the early 1800s. The school honors and celebrates its Catholic identity, so Father Hesburgh suggested using the blank space to honor saints and scholars throughout history as an appropriate way to reference the knowledge contained in the library, as well as representing the spiritual roots of Notre Dame itself.

School officials commissioned California artist, educator, arts administrator, and architect Millard Sheets to create the artwork.

Mosaic as reflected in pool in front of the library

Sheets began painting as a child and exhibiting his watercolor paintings by the time he was a teenager. He studied art in Paris in 1929 and 1930, where he met artist Henri Matisse.

Looking at Sheets' Notre Dame mosaic, I can see a bit of that famous artist's influence on Sheets. Professor John W. Stamper of Notre Dame's School of Architecture also mentioned seeing the influence of Impressionist and Cubist styles in Sheets' mosaic in a short video produced by the school about it.

Sheets became important to California's watercolor movement by the 1930s, becoming the president of the California Water Color Society in 1946.

Sheets also worked with the New Deal's WPA during the Great Depression, helping hire artists and overseeing public projects like the 1937 construction of a 12,000-square-foot art gallery in Los Angeles.

Perhaps his work the WPA helped fuel Sheets' later interest large-scale public projects. By the 1950s, he was an architect and mosaic artist for more than 50 bank branch buildings in Southern California.

The University of Notre Dame commission surely appealed to Sheets' belief that art should be part of daily life, and creating a large-scale public artwork was a good fit for Sheets' talent and experience.

Sheets began by sketching his ideas to illustrate Father Hersburgh's initial idea and a Bible passage (John 1: 1-5) for the piece eventually entitled "Word of Life". He drew Christ as a great teacher, looming larger over the other thinkers and saints throughout history.

The Christ figure's upraised arms, and the mosaic's location on the wall directly behind the north end zone of the university's football stadium, led most people to refer to the mosaic by a more prosaic nickname, "Touchdown Jesus".

The similarity of the Christ figure's stance to a football referee's signal for a touchdown was difficult to deny, and the university chose to embrace the nickname. Father Hesburgh himself saw the nickname as an affectionate appellation for the mosaic.

Sheets supervised workers as they laid out his sketch on the floor of a basketball court and assembled the artwork as 324 large panels. The mosaic consists of approximately 6,700 pieces of granite in 140 different colors and from 11 states and 16 different countries.

Workers installed the panels on the side of the building, leaving a slight space between the wall and the mosaic to accommodate contraction and expansion caused by temperature changes.

The full installation is 134 feet tall and 68 feet wide. The face of the Christ figure alone is nine feet tall and features 115 difference pieces of stone.

Drapery hid the mosaic until its unveiling at the library's formal dedication on May 7, 1964.

The mural still watches over the school's football stadium, although an expansion of the facility obscured the artwork from part of the field.

"Touchdown Jesus" is one of over 200 architectural designs and murals across the US credited to Millard Sheets, and his artwork hangs in 46 museums in 15 states. You can view his work at Midwestern venues like the Chicago Art Institute and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

I was especially interested to learn that Sheets created the "River of Knowledge" mosaic on the Cass Avenue facade of the Detroit Public Library. I saw this mosaic many times as I walked to classes at State Hall, across the street from the library on Wayne State University's campus.

Read Back to school at Indiana's University of Notre Dame and Photo Friday: O'Shag Hall at Indiana's University of Notre Dame to find out more about our campus visit.

Curious about the multi-faceted artist? Check out Millard Sheets: One-Man Renaissance by Janice Lovoos and Edmund F. Penney.

You can also check out Touchdown Jesus: Faith and Fandom at Notre Dame by Scott Eden for a look at football and religion in Notre Dame's campus culture.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
South Bend

Back to school at Indiana's University of Notre Dame

The University of Notre Dame near South Bend, Indiana, has a notable history especially when it comes to athletics, but it was the university's photogenic architecture that drew us to campus for a recent visit.

Buildings like the Main Hall with its Golden Dome, the Hesburgh Library with its giant mosaic popularly known as "Touchdown Jesus", and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart dominate the landscape. I'll cover a few of these buildings in greater depth in coming months. Today I'll offer a brief history of the university and a glimpse at some of the architecture and public art on campus.

The University of Notre Dame traces its origins to Catholic missionaries who came to northern Indiana in the early 1800s in an effort to evangelize among Native Americans in the area. Today the school honors and celebrates its Catholic identity, something readily apparent in the religious art, numerous chapels, the imposing Gothic-inspired Basilica, and a heavy emphasis on faith and service at Notre Dame.

In 1842, the Bishop of Vincennes offered Father Edward Sorin, a 28-year-old French priest and missionary, 524 acres of land in northern Indiana with the condition that Sorin establish a school there within two years.

Father Sorin

Father Sorin traveled to the tract of land to discover an abandoned log cabin built by other missionaries a decade earlier. Sorin and his crew worked to make the cabin habitable and built a church and school building of rough timber.

The Log Chapel on campus today replicates the original log cabin (destroyed by fire during the late 1800s).

The school's then-wilderness location worked to its advantage because it was the only Catholic school of consequence easily accessible to places like Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Its relative isolation also meant that its students didn't always have adequate schooling to prepare for classical college-level work, so Notre Dame also offered basic courses, college prep classes, and a manual labor school in addition to a traditional college curriculum of arts and letters, philosophy, history, math, and languages.

The State of Indiana granted Notre Dame its charter in 1844. Workers completed a four-story main building with a dome that same year, and the university granted its first degrees in 1849.

Father Sorin served as Notre Dame's first president, remaining in that post until 1865.

Statues in Shaheen-Mestrovic Memorial Park honoring the university's sculptor-in-residence Ivan Mestrovic (b. 1883, d.1962)

In 1844, Sisters of the Holy Cross established a nearby school for women called St. Mary's College as Notre Dame didn't officially admit female students until 1972. Today, St. Mary's College is a pretty little campus, but heavy winds coming through the night before our visit resulted in fallen trees and blocked off areas making it impossible for us to take decent photos (leaving something to do for our next visit).

The opening of railroads and canals to ease travel to the Midwest, and large European immigrant populations of Catholics settling in the area, fueled Notre Dame's growth.  

In April of 1879, fire destroyed almost all of the buildings on campus. Students resumed school in a newly rebuilt Main Building by September of the same year.

The Main Building, with its Golden Dome topped by a 19-foot-tall, 4,000-pound statue of St. Mary, remains a focal point on campus. The school re-gilded the dome in 2005. Interestingly, it only took about a fist-full of gold leaf to cover the entire dome!

Today, Notre Dame's many buildings date from various eras. I appreciate the fact that the school's newer buildings complement the older buildings in style, and they all easily blend together as one cohesive and harmonious whole, without looking dated or appearing as a jumble of disparate styles.

 

Feed the term "University of Notre Dame history" into a search engine and you'll likely get more links about the school's football history than anything else. Check out the stories of some of Notre Dame's most notable football games, including its first contest in 1887 versus the University of Michigan in Greatest Moments in Notre Dame Football History by John Heisler.

Football and the team's identity as "the Fighting Irish" became increasingly important in Notre Dame's culture, starting on the 1920s. Did the name originate because of stereotypes of combative Irishmen, or did it originate as the result of violent fighting between Notre Dame students and anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan groups on campus in 1924? Check out Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker to learn more about this little-known conflict.

Interested in the early history of the University of Notre Dame or St. Mary's College? Check out A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame Du Lac, Indiana, from 1842 to 1892 (a book prepared for the school's 150th anniversary) or Saint Mary's College by Amanda Divine and Colin-Elizabeth Pier.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
South Bend

More Tiffany treasures inside Wade Chapel at Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery

We loved the beautiful Tiffany-designed interior we saw at the Wade Chapel at Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery, and I thought I would share a few more photos from our visit today.

 

 

Tiffany's Favrile process gives his stained glass window an especially opalescent and iridescent quality and a more pastel and varied palette of colors that the usual primary palette of other stained glass windows.

 

 

The complex mosaic patterns in the floor thought to represent the sea.

 

 

The chapel's Moorish-influenced lamps, carved from a single piece of alabaster, were among the first electric lights in Cleveland.

 

 

The Jeptha Wade Memorial Chapel booklet issued by the Lake View Cemetery Association has a wealth of information about the architectural and design details of this beautiful chapel. I purchased my booklet at the gift shop in the cemetery's Garfield Monument building, which is open April 1 through mid-November.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

Wade Chapel houses Tiffany treasure at Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery

We weren't entirely sure what to expect when Roger from Ohio's Tourism Division urged us to visit Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery because of our interest in history, architecture, and photography, but we took his advice and spent the better part of a day exploring this fascinating cemetery.

The 285-acre cemetery, established in 1869, gave planners plenty of space to execute their vision of a garden to rival the grand Victorian gardens in England and France.

Lake View Cemetery may be best known as the final resting place of U.S. President James A. Garfield (you can expect to see more stories here about Lake View's massive Garfield Monument and other interesting sites in the cemetery), but we didn't go to Lake View expecting to see one of the nation's best examples of the work of famed stained glass artisan Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The cemetery's Wade Chapel is one of Cleveland's most treasured architectural gems. The chapel's Tiffany-designed interior, which is one of few intact Tiffany interiors in existence, earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

The exterior's simple and classic Greek- and Roman-inspired lines don't really prepare visitors for the little chapel's intricate Art Nouveau interior, highlighted by Tiffany mosaics and a spectacular stained glass window depicting themes of spiritual fulfillment, resurrection and immortality.

You can tour the chapel's interior and meet with a docent to learn about the chapel's construction, history, and artwork between April 1 and mid-November.

Jeptha Homer Wade (1811-1890), a business man best known as one of the founders of Western Union Telegraph Company, was the first president of Lake View Cemetery's board of trustees. Wade died in 1890, and his grandson, Jeptha H. Wade II, Wade asked architect Dominick Benes to design Wade Chapel to honor the elder Wade.

The chapel, completed in 1901, was the first well-known Cleveland landmark designed by Benes, and his architectural partner Benjamin S. Hubbell. Benes and Hubbell designed several other important Cleveland buildings, including the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1916.

Two massive bronze doors open to admit visitors into the chapel's Tiffany-designed interior. The 7' x 9' Tiffany stained glass window depicting the soul's ascendance from earth to heaven stands at the front of the chapel, and the chapel is flanked by two gold-and-glass, 8'x32' mosaic walls designed by Frederick Wilson that depict the Prophecy and law of the Old Testament (east wall) and the fulfillment of those laws through the birth of Christianity and the New Testament (west wall).

The window takes on an especially ethereal quality due to Tiffany's Favrile process, where exposure of glass to chemicals and fumes of molten metal during processing gave the glass its unique opalescence and iridescence. Only Tiffany himself and a few trusted artisans knew the exact formulation of elements in the Favrile process, and that knowledge died with them.

Tiffany personally selected this window as one of 100 pieces he displayed at the World Exposition in Paris in 1900, earning a gold medal from the expo for his work.

The Wade Chapel docent tours last about a half-hour, and our docent was quite good about explaining the symbolism of each artistic element of the chapel's glasswork, architecture, and fixtures. I was also able to pick up an informative booklet about the chapel at a small gift store in the Garfield Memorial building, which is also open April 1 through mid-November.

Come back later this week for a closer look at some of the details of Wade Chapel's Tiffany-designed interior.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

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