The Church of Our Savior

The joys of the Reverend farmer.

This piece first appeared in The Vermont Standard.

Not many souls stumble upon Killington’s The Church of Our Savior. Most who do wonder down Mission Farm Road to the diminutive, white granite-faced sanctuary continue on, guessing that they’ve happened on a private chapel. And skiers in the vast parking lot for the Killington Skye Ship are perhaps too occupied with wrestling boots and poles to notice the gabled nave or the snow-blanketed hip-roof of the belfry just across the Ottauquechee River. The lucky or the curious who discover that the church is, in fact, an active Protestant Episcopalian place of worship and almost always open to the public, are also likely to be charmed by its quiet surprises.

The Reverend Diane Root, priest of twelve years at The Church of Our Savior, says that while the church is tiny and operates on a small scale, “hospitality is a key piece of our mission.” The twenty-five or so current members are ever pursuing ways, subtle as well as significant, to reach out to the larger community.

A lion and a lamb fashioned from bales of hay, for example, sit near the roadside opposite the church. Old logging roads run through the acres of property that rise up in the mountains; members are working to clear trails that they hope to open to hikers and snowshoers. A hose line has been run out to the street side so that in summer passing bikers and hikers can pause for a drink. A substantial garden that had become tangled and wild is now restored. At the peak of its beauty in late May and early June, the garden bursts with blooms of iris, phlox, amenomies, and oriental poppies. The peals of a circa 1894 bell, suspended high in the belfry, announce the commencement of the weekly Sunday morning service and then punctuate its conclusion. And there is the quiet contemplation that all are welcome to enjoy inside the church. Passersby are free to sit in the carved pews of the sanctuary, under the ribbed, vaulted roof and perhaps reflect on its suspended crucifix, with cross made from oak cut on the property and Corpus crafted in Oberammergau, Germany. Or they can simply relax and think of nothing at all.

Because of its architectural and historic significance, The Church of Our Savior was added to the National Register of Historic Places in the early 1990’s. Its story begins when Josiah and Judith Wood first settled the property, which sits in a narrow valley between belts of the Green Mountain range, in 1797. The Woods’ sixth child, Elizabeth, born 1807, passed a happy and active girlhood on her parent’s farm, which she recounted years later with affectionate memories “twined around every rivulet, foot-path, tree and rock near the dear home and our own little world, which I often revisit in dreams.” Her older sister Nancy, in commemorating their father’s eightieth birthday, wrote about the “green velvet carpet” and beautiful red fruit of the farm’s apple orchard, and it’s gooseberry and rose bushes. The girls and their siblings fed the cows and tended newborn lambs; they tagged along after their father as he took the sheep to the river for bathing and shearing. They relished riding in the horse-drawn sleigh in winter, planting in spring, and fanning wheat at harvest. In her own correspondence, Elizabeth recalled, “We had plenty of food. Plenty of work, very little indigestion, or nervousness. I will not say we were very good children but am sure we were happy.”

While the acres surrounding the sanctuary were for decades employed as fields for crops and grazing livestock, the church building itself is the fruit of the American dream, realized through years of industrial toil. On a summer day in 1831, Elizabeth Wood married Bridgewater merchant Charles Clement at the farm. The couple lived for a time in Illinois, but returned to Vermont and shortly settled in Rutland, where Clement resumed earning a living as a retailer.

The tenacious Clement possessed an appetite for hard work and an instinct for business opportunity. A marble quarrying and manufacturing business he started with partners sold after twenty-five years for an “advantageous” price. Meanwhile, he and his sons formed the Clement National Bank. And, at a time when the Rutland Railroad Company suffered from apparent mismanagement, Clement became its President and reformed it. The financial net of Clement’s vitae was substantial. “He began his business life without capital,” wrote his middle son Percival, “but by faithful attention to the day’s work, he had at his death accumulated a large fortune.”

In the span of sixteen years beginning in 1835, Elizabeth Clement birthed eight children; four of them died in infant- or toddler-hood, another at age thirty-six. The Protestant Episcopal faith was, through all the years of the family’s life, an essential component. “Father” Clement was active in the development of the Trinity Church of Rutland; “Mother” Clement’s devotion to the study of her prayer book was universally noted. After Charles Clement died at eighty-six in 1893, it was in memoriam to their lost children, Frederic-Percival, Melville-Wood, Herbert-Rogers, Fayette-Rogers, and Anna-Elizabeth, and in tribute to her husband, that Elizabeth Clement decided to build a church with a bit of the family wealth.

For the site, she chose the source of her beloved childhood memories: the spot on which her father in 1797 raised the family’s original Killington home. The farm had changed hands, so Clement bought it back, including a second house her father constructed in 1817 when the first home burned, a handful of out buildings, and hundreds of surrounding acres. London-born architect Arthur H. Smith designed a structure resembling an English country church, one of his early projects in twenty-five years or so of practice out of Rutland. The carved white granite used for the church’s exterior was quarried in Plymouth, Vermont.

Today, The Church of Our Savior remains as Elizabeth Clement built it. The asymmetrical layout, steeply pitched roof, arched windows and doors, buttressed belfry, and overall medieval look are elements of the Gothic Revival style that was popular for churches, particularly Episcopalian Churches, constructed in the 19th century. Within the confines of its small imprint, about sixty-two by fifty feet, there is a vestibule with a bell tower, a sanctuary with seating for about 130, a sacristy for storing sacred vessels, and a parish hall. Clement deeded the church, adjacent and nearby buildings, about 200 acres, and a small cemetery plot to the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont.

In the 115 years since its construction, the church has been led by a handful of priests; three of them served for over twenty years. All were imbued with a love of their chosen ministry and with a respect for farming and basic values. But all of them shouldered the struggle inherent in Elizabeth Clement’s gift, the on-going crusade to build a congregation large enough to keep an isolated country church going.

The tenures of the Reverends Truman Heminway and Daniel Goldsmith perhaps best illustrate both the challenging and the sweet aspects of such an undertaking.

The loss of both his parents before he reached adulthood had early on interrupted Heminway’s plans for college, and he instead took up cattle ranching in Calgary, Alberta. Perhaps as a result of his wife Gertrude’s influence, a few years later he decided to pursue the ministry, and was accepted to the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in spite of his lack of a college education. He was ordained to the priesthood at age 27 and subsequently served churches in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

When Heminway arrived in at The Church of Our Savior in 1931, it had been without a priest for half a dozen years, and had no congregation. The farmhouse rectory was deteriorating, the fields were untended. Heminway’s intense individuality may have been a factor in his decision to accept a position at the dormant parish; according to Episcopal biographer H. Boone Porter, Heminway “could not bear the constraint of what most would consider a normal American community.”

In any event, he and Gertrude took up the responsibility of working the farm, tending livestock, ministering to the community, and gathering a congregation. Longtime parishioner Mary Jenne of Bridgewater recalls Reverend Heminway with great affection. “He wasn’t such a big man,” she says of his physicality; of his demeanor, she adds, “He was very loving, but he was very abrupt also. A worldly man, well-read. He could be loud and he could be soft, he could be very dramatic and yet he could be very serious.”

Heminway conducted daily morning and evening prayer services in a cassock he slipped over his farm clothes. Jenne recalls that he came to her home for the lessons she needed to prepare for confirmation. The parish was host to frequent guests; the Heminways updated a carriage shed attached to the rectory to accommodate them. And the Reverend was often out in the community; he served on the then-Sherburne school board and was for many years the town’s Moderator.

By the mid-1950’s, however, the congregation of The Church of Our Savior was still very small, only a bit larger than it had been two decades earlier. And Heminway suffered from a heart condition that began to limit his physical activity. He died in September 1957 of heart failure just as he began Sunday service at St. Barnabas Church in Norwich. For Mary Jenne, the news was devastating. “He was a farmer, he was right down to earth,” she says, but also, “he brought a new element into our lives.”

The Reverend Daniel Goldsmith petitioned for his 1964 assignment to The Church of Our Savior. “He was a farmer long before he was a minister,” says his son, Nick Goldsmith, a Woodstock photographer, “Once he was in the Diocese of Vermont, he was looking for a parish where there was land so he could have a working farm.”

While the elder Goldsmith studied at the Julliard School of Music in New York City, he played the upright bass in Harlem jazz clubs. But as a twenty-something he turned to dairy farming. He managed a herd of 30 or 40 cows in Tunbridge, Vermont before he had to leave them in the care of his neighbor to serve four years in World War II as an infantry soldier. When he returned, he worked his way through seminary school in Wisconsin by toiling on dairy farms.

The younger Goldsmith recalls an idyllic life as a child at The Church of Our Savior farm. “It was like a fairy tale,” he says, “Gardens everywhere. Critters. Very sheltered, a little slice of heaven. I didn’t wear shoes all summer.” The family grew subsistence crops, and kept dairy and beef cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep. The Reverend sold eggs in the vestibule after services. His wife Nadya created a renowned flower garden, and reportedly planned the progression of its colorful blooms to match the liturgical season. During their twenty-six years at the farm, the Goldsmiths added a sugarhouse, a pigpen, and sheep and tool sheds.

But certainly life was not just about the farming. Ever mindful of his ministerial duties, Reverend Goldsmith almost always wore long sleeves and his collar as he worked in the fields.   In the 1970’s he raised 17 Nubian goats, and had parishioners raise another 43, which he flew to Honduras to give to needy families as part of the Heifer Project. He presided over daily morning and evening prayer services as well as Sunday church. There was even a choir with 6 or 8 children. When Goldsmith retired in 1990, though, the still small congregation was left without a priest. “It’s always been small,” says parishioner Jenne, “We all work very hard to keep it going, but it’s always been that way.”

Although small may be beautiful in the eyes of many, its down side is always lurking for an entity that routinely needs roof and masonry repairs or updates to plumbing and wiring. Elizabeth Clement endowed the church with $15,000 in 1897, which still produces a modest income, but it doesn’t cover the expense of maintaining the church, the rectory, other buildings, and the ministry. Then of course there’s the notion that any community requires a critical mass to sustain itself.

So The Church of Our Savior has been working with the non-sectarian, non-profit organization Partners for Sacred Places to learn how best to use the its many assets to connect with the outside world and create the nourishment it needs. “We’re this handful of people with all these resources and we want to make them available to the larger community in whatever way we’re able,” says Reverend Root.

The sanctuary’s vaulted, bead-boarded ceiling makes for good acoustics, for example, so the church hosts four or five concerts a year, including Killington Music Festival performances. On January 2, 2011 the Renewal Chorus, a gospel and world music group, will sing there. Other enterprises, though modest, will hopefully spread the church’s message of friendly caring. The Heminway House, the old carriage shed that Truman and Florence Heminway originally converted to a guesthouse, is available to church and non-profit groups for overnight stays. Parishioner and baker Tim Owings runs the church’s wholesale Mission Bakery from a building on the property. At Christmas and Easter, his molded sugar cookies, hand finished with edible gold and crystallized sugar, are available on-line through Monastery Greetings. The Woodstock Farmer’s Market and the Upper Valley Coop sell his raspberry, blueberry, and apricot tarts.

While Reverend Root takes joy in all the church’s secular activities, she hopes too that worshippers outside of her regular congregation will notice, and participate in, the church’s beautiful liturgies. She especially enjoys December’s Christmas Eve service, the powerful Easter Vigil in the spring, and the Blessing of the Animals in October. “We try to live locally in a way that is not exploitive, and that is kind,” says Root, “Part of it is treating the spiritual neighborhood, people of other faiths and commitments and convictions with dignity and respect.”