A children’s choir is rehearsing a Christmas pageant before empty pews as Ramon Segers strolls up the central aisle of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wellsboro. Ramon, then the parish’s acolyte, or altar server, pauses two-thirds of the way up the red carpet. This is the spot, he explains, where acolytes stand for part of each Sunday communion service, holding open the book of the gospels for the priest to read aloud.

“Now, see that window there?” he asks, and points out a slender vertical window of golden glass high above the white marble altar. “Some mornings the sun comes through that and also from these,” and here he gestures to the large, multi-paned windows high on the left and right walls, “and the light shines right onto the gospel.”

Might this be a perception enhanced by spiritual devotion? Perhaps. But those luminous windows—like all of St. Paul’s interior décor—are indeed worthy of marvel.

Completed in 1899 and seating three hundred and fifty, St. Paul’s bears the wry nickname “Cathedral of the North” around the Diocese of Harrisburg, a poke at its improbable grandeur here in rural, upstate Pennsylvania. And yet this stately, Romanesque stone “cathedral” fronting the town green is special for another reason.

Its high marble altar and gilded altar screen, its chancel’s mosaic floor, the marble pulpit, the marble baptismal font, that vibrant, multihued rose window at the rear of the nave, and its ten majestic stained glass windows were crafted by the workshops of the legendary Louis Comfort Tiffany. While you may know him for his brilliantly colored stained glass windows and lamps, Louis was also a master of jewelry, pottery, furniture, textile, and photography who radically transformed the world of decorative art and design in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

And yet its unique status is virtually unknown outside its walls. An online search yields no published articles about the Louis Tiffany presence at St. Paul’s, which is referenced only once in a list of public sites decorated by Tiffany Studios. This story appears to be the first to shine a light on the parish’s many Tiffany treasures.

Louis (pronounced Louie) might not have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he was surely fed with one; his father was Charles L. Tiffany, founder of the iconic New York jewelry store. Surrounded by beauty and elegance as soon as he opened his eyes, Louis grew up to become a restless, visionary artist who “believed that beauty itself had called on him to create beauty using every material on the face of the earth,” says Jennifer Thalheimer, director of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum in Winter Park, Florida, the world’s largest collection of Tiffany art. “And that’s what he set out to do.”

His shared reinvention of stained glass has a tangled history that we’ll visit below. Suffice it to say that starting around 1878 and continuing for six decades, Louis and his New York City workshops created legendary stained glass and other decorative objects for some fifteen hundred American churches and other public spaces. Nearly a third of those—435—were in New York State, with 186 in Pennsylvania. And yet only a handful of churches have ever possessed an array of Tiffany art as complete as St. Paul’s.

It was love at first sight for the Rev. Canon Gregory Hinton, who served as priest of St. Paul’s for twenty-four years. “I was there for an interview with the vestry,” he recalls recently, “and said I would love to see inside. So a vestry member escorted me in, and I was just dumbfounded by the beauty and majesty of it. It was something I always appreciated.” Father Hinton retired in 2018.

A Room with a View

What makes the sanctuary even more distinctive is that the windows at St. Paul’s don’t feature any of the gospel scenes typically associated with Tiffany Studios. No haloed saints, no winged angels, no transfigured saviors or trembling shepherds gaze down from the walls. Here you will find no mossy green forests, no coral sunsets melting into amethyst, no climbing wisteria or rippling mountain streams. And, with the exception of the rose window, they contain none of the saturated hues most people associate with Tiffany lamps and windows.

Instead, the seven large windows on the east wall and the three on the west are composed of hundreds of four-inch squares of parchment-colored glass, with every pane subtly different. Dappled here with pale gold, there with sky blue or amber, the overall effect suggests faint mother-of-pearl. Each window is also bordered by a repeating geometric pattern of ochre and sepia, and the two largest contain an encircled cross.

At first glance “they can seem very plain,” acknowledges Father Hinton. “But when the sun is shining, it’s like the fire of grace is shining through them. I would walk into the church in late fall and it almost looked like a conflagration on the other side. It would be really, dramatically moving.”

He was astounded back in 2000 when a glazier preparing to repair one of the smaller windows insisted it first be insured. “The appraisal came back $186,000,” he recalls, “so I can only imagine what it’s worth now.” (About $350,000.) And yet to esteem a liturgical object for its monetary value misses its point, he insists. The transcendent otherness of its artistry should “lift us from our everyday life and work and remind us we’ve entered someplace unique…It serves as a special intimation of almighty God in our lives.”

The Rev. David Perkins and then the Rev. Edward Erb followed Father Hinton as rector, and when Rev. Erb retired in January the parish sent word around the Episcopal Church USA that it was seeking a full-time rector “with a solid background in scripture and traditional liturgies.”

“We value traditional Sunday worship together above all other group activities,” they announced on their website. The announcement went on to say that St. Paul’s is “one of the rare fully integrated Tiffany churches,” and cited its “beautiful Vermont marble altar inlaid with Tiffany iridescent lustre glass mosaic” before moving on to the more substantive topic of church community. And so it was that on Sunday, October 19, senior warden George Osgood, the lay leader, stepped before about thirty-five mostly gray-haired congregants to announce that the vestry had chosen Rev. Millard Cook as the parish’s new priest-in-charge. “He’s sixty-two, single, and a Franciscan friar,” he said. “He’ll be here in two weeks.”

Reached a few days later in Harrisburg, where he’d been serving as a supply pastor for area parishes without full-time clergy, Father Millard—formerly a Roman Catholic priest—says he was impressed with the beauty of the interior. But what impresses him most is the number of parishioners—many of them new to the Episcopal Church and the parish—“who said they experienced a home at St. Paul’s. I consider that a healthy sign. It shows me that St. Paul’s not only professes to be welcoming and inclusive, but that they are.”

Where It Began

One might begin the story of St. Paul’s interior decoration from either of two points of origin. A conventional treatment would tell how the congregation emerged in 1838 from the remnant of a Quaker community founded in 1806. After decades worshipping in a former schoolhouse at Charles and Walnut Streets, it opened the doors to its current church, at Pearl and Charles Streets, in 1899, with all its windows by Tiffany Studios. The firm installed the new altar and likely the pulpit in 1914, while the baptismal font’s dedication date of 1916 suggests it arrived that year. Alas, a diligent search of the vestry’s records and contemporary newspapers revealed nothing of the parish’s plans to contract with Tiffany or what its aesthetic vision might be.

So let us instead fly back in time to Newport, Rhode Island. It’s around 1865, and we will peek into the simple clapboard house at 24 Kay Street where a gifted young muralist, John LaFarge, lies ill, perhaps poisoned by the lead and other toxic metals in his paints. And as we watch, a beam of sunlight illuminates a bottle in his room—legend says it was tooth powder—and LaFarge sits up, fascinated with how the colored glass scatters the light.

About age thirty, he resolves to learn glassmaking and is soon experimenting with “opalescent” glass, a traditional technique that embeds metallic oxides—cobalt for blue, nickel for violet, etc.—in molten glass to produce rich colors, but which had rarely been used in windows. LaFarge is soon creating astonishing new hues, but his great leap comes when he begins “plating” or layering sheets of opalescent glass of different hues and thickness and fusing them together. The combined effect is startling: a three-dimensionality that lends depth and realism to the images. This he further enhances by sometimes corrugating the exterior surface to simulate ripples in images of water and sunsets and meadows.

Until then, stained glass had been made by painting and firing colors onto clear blown glass. By layering and fusing opalescent glass, LaFarge had overturned a thousand years of stained glass tradition. And it was sometime in the 1870s that he made a fateful decision. He showed his novel techniques to a “sometime artist and decorator” thirteen years his junior: Louis Tiffany. Their relationship grew, and by 1880, when LaFarge patented his technique, Louis was generating brilliantly innovative pieces that rivaled his friend’s.

But that same year Louis applied for a similar patent, and their friendship quickly soured. While LaFarge’s patent focused more on the materials of the glass and Tiffany’s on the layering of the plates, by 1882 LaFarge was preparing to sue Tiffany for patent infringement. What happened next is not clear, but the lawsuit never went to court. Some scholars surmise each of these geniuses realized he needed the other’s patent to make these new “American” style windows, and let the matter drop. Nevertheless, they remained bitter rivals.

LaFarge enjoyed a much-in-demand reputation as a muralist and stained glass maker, with clients that included industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, Harvard University, and Boston’s majestic Trinity Church. “He was an incredible artist. In some cases I prefer his work,” says Jennifer. “But he was a terrible businessman.” A moody perfectionist who personally oversaw every project (unlike Tiffany), he often overran budgets and deadlines and got into feuds with his business partners. In 1885, his Manhattan-based LaFarge Decorative Arts Company collapsed, although he continued to take on commissions—including the two large stained glass windows at the First Presbyterian Church of Wellsboro, installed in 1895. Featuring intricate floral and geometric designs, they, like St. Paul’s, display no gospel scenes but are glorious in sunlight. Sadly, LaFarge died in 1910, deep in debt.

Louis, on the other hand, was as gifted an entrepreneur as he was a designer. For the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (technically the Columbia Exposition), his Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company simulated a breathtakingly beautiful full-scale chapel. Byzantine-inspired, it featured sixteen massive columns, six ornately carved arches, a marble altar, a pulpit, and a massive, egg-shaped baptismal font, all covered in glass mosaic. If that were not enough, the thousand-square-foot “chapel” was illuminated by three brilliant stained glass windows and an eight-by-ten-foot electrified chandelier—powered by the thrillingly new alternating current—in the shape of a 3D cross. The effect was so awe-inspiring that some visitors doffed their hats.

Louis and his representatives went one step further: they presented him to visitors as the genius behind this stunning new style of stained glass, with no acknowledgment of LaFarge. Louis Comfort Tiffany was now the rock star of liturgical design, and at the height of his powers his New York studios would employ more than three hundred artisans.

He died at eighty-four in 1933, “but his business, which started about 1878, lasted until 1938,” Jennifer explains over the phone. “That’s a really long time to be in a business that depends on style.” She mentions that Louis’s celebrated 1893 chapel is on display at the Morse Museum. And by the way: she’ll soon be visiting the Corning Museum of Glass. She’d like to visit St. Paul’s.

Pretty, but Not Too Pretty

On a sunny October morning, Jennifer and her husband, Joe, arrive. Ramon (he’s now studying for the priesthood) welcomes them and escorts them to the vacant pastor’s office to show them the original framed design sketch of the altar signed by Louis himself. They then proceed into the nave, or central part of the church containing the pews. After glancing around—“My mind is everywhere,” she marvels—Jennifer turns her attention to the windows.

Those uniformly square panes are what’s known as “quarry glass,” she explains, from the French carrè for “square.” “They were not inexpensive, but often temporary,” and typically installed as a placeholder until members of the congregation commissioned more ornate memorial windows dedicated to themselves or a family member.

Still, some conservative congregations simply didn’t want the “distraction” of brilliantly colored or figurative windows and stayed with quarry style. And a snobbish congregation might disdain figurative windows on grounds that they had no need for gospel scenes to teach the unlettered. Quarry windows “could be a statement that says ‘We’re all educated.’”

Over at the pulpit she leans in to study the small glass squares, or tesserae, that face its six sides. What may appear blandly beige from afar reveals itself to be a mosaic of subtly varied, pearl-colored glass, fronted by a mosaic Maltese cross of pale pinks, lavenders, celery, and smokey blues, which she crouches to inspect. “What’s really interesting is the mortar,” she says. “It may be gilt. And they put a finish on so that it gives this beautiful, uniform tone.”

She then points out the palm-sized medallion at the center of the pulpit’s front-facing cross. Raised and round, the medallion is surrounded by what appear to be eight embedded marbles.

“This is called a turtleback,” she tells Ramon. “Tiffany liked to add visual interest, things that caught the light.” Ramon asks if the marbles are glass. Yes, she says, but “they were finished with an iridescent surface.” Tiffany artisans would “fume” a mist of iron minerals over the glass to replicate the iridescence of long-buried glass pieces found in ancient cities like Rome.

Next she lays a finger on the blue lapis and gold glass trim bordering the pulpit walls. The design is called Cosmati, she explains. “It became associated with Tiffany,” but it’s named for an Italian family that developed such winding patterns in the thirteenth century. She steps back. “Look at how many patterns there are,” she marvels. “Yet they all blend beautifully.”

Moving forward, Ramon points out the mosaic tile floor of the chancel, in which the choir sits at service, and then they study the wooden, gothic-style communion rail. It might be Tiffany, she says, but his studio sometimes commissioned woodwork to subcontractors. They then approach the high altar, nine steps above the nave floor, which, like the pulpit, is surfaced with hundreds of multihued glass tiles, the tesserae.

“You can see the iridescence, how it captures the light and seems to be moving as you move,” she says, and yet marvels at its simplicity. “Just tile. No glass gems or anything else.” She then pulls out a magnifying glass to inspect the veined, beige marble of the altar and tall altarpiece, or reredos, behind it. “Absolutely beautiful,” she says, before stepping back to admire the vast, arching altar screen filling the rear wall. Yet another Louis creation, its silvery foil surface is stencilled with interlocking swirls of green ivy and red berries.

As they stroll to the rear of the nave, Jennifer points up at the half-dozen circular wrought iron chandeliers. “The upper part, the chains and knobs, looks like Tiffany,” she says, “but the bottom does not.” She wonders if they might originally have held gas lamps, and Ramon mentions that in the 1940s the Rambusch Lighting Company of Jersey City, New Jersey, replaced them. Rambusch also repaired water damage to the altar screen in the 1980s, and this year replaced a marble pilaster, or rectangular column, on the altar piece at a cost of $74,000.

She is skeptical, however, of the origins of the large, wrought iron central chandelier. “That is not typical of what they [Tiffany Studios] would have produced,” she says, “but you can never say never.”

The circular rose window high above the entry doors next catches her eye. Five green acanthus leaves on a blue field surround an inner circle containing a white disk that might represent a communion wafer. “This is interesting,” she says. “Rose windows are often figurative. They contain biblical stories or symbols or saints. So this tells me they [St. Paul’s] didn’t want in-your-face imagery…Even though they went for Tiffany, it seems they did not want a lot of symbols. They didn’t want anything gaudy.”

“Well, this town was founded by Quakers,” Ramon replies. “That might explain why everything is so simple. Or they may have wanted a more ‘Protestant’ aesthetic instead of the ‘high church’ look.”

“That makes perfect sense,” she replies.

At last they make their way to the baptismal font, positioned at the entry to the church to signify one’s entry into Christian faith. It, too, is of beige marble faced with tesserated glass, and also features an amber and jade-colored Maltese cross. “The coloring is just beautiful,” she marvels, but what she finds particularly delightful is its broad wooden lid, which she lifts to examine.

“It’s likely by Joseph Briggs,” she says. An accomplished wood-carver, “he began sweeping floors for Tiffany, then moved to glass cutting.” He later became head of mosaics, a close friend of Louis, and ran the company after Louis retired.

Celebrating God in Nature and Beauty

As they approach the exit she takes one final glance over the whole interior. “Fascinating,” she murmurs, before she and Joe stroll over to the Green Free Library, once the home of Chester Robinson, a wealthy lumber baron. There they inspect a classic Tiffany glass door installed in 1903. Custom-made, it depicts a smokey blue vine and a tree with a sunset sky and hills in the distance, once the view behind this stately mansion.

This being a weekday, the handsome red doors of the Presbyterian Church next door are locked, and so they head back to Corning. What they have missed are not just the LaFarge windows but a splendid new stained glass window in the vestibule. A gift of the late violinist Al Lofgren, a member of the congregation, and installed in 1995, it depicts a dark green woods populated by a buck, a pheasant, an owl, a grouse, and a cardinal, with a stream coursing down its center.

Above it angels blow on trumpets, and the border displays horns, a drum, a lyre, a tambourine, bells, and musical notes. Created and installed by Willet Stained Glass Studio of Winona, Minnesota, it cost fifty thousand dollars.

“Al wanted something that would accentuate the idea that in nature God is praised, and the hills and wildlife are God’s,” explains the Rev. Bob Greer, pastor from 1992 to 2007. Along with the glorious figurative windows gracing Wellsboro United Methodist Church, created by Haskins & Co. of Rochester, they testify most eloquently to the truth that Louis Comfort Tiffany was just one of countless artisans, nearly all anonymous, who have long brought extraordinary beauty to the worship of God.

Still, Father Millard, who went around the nave on his first Sunday greeting each parishioner with a handshake and a “Peace be with you,” says he’s already captivated by the lambent glow of St. Paul’s windows, “which so lend themselves to quiet contemplation.”

“Who else [but Tiffany] could capture the magnificence of each individual pane?” he wonders. “As the sun moves around the church, every single panel will receive the light of the sun and its moment of glory,” much as divine grace can touch individuals at different times and places. In those seemingly plain “quarry” windows, he surmises, the congregants of St. Paul’s “may have found just what they were looking for.”