When you walk into All Saints' Episcopal Church, the most striking, physical feature that you see before you is the stone wall behind the Altar. It's an incredible piece of work, skill, and masonry, and we are truly blessed to have this wonderful stone wall in our church.
Did you know that the wall is six feet thick from top to bottom! The base is forty feet wide at the bottom and tapers to four feet wide at the top. The height of the wall is fifty feet!
When the main church was constructed in 1961, each parishioner brought stones to the church from their own back yards. The rest of the stones were found in the general Chelmsford area by the architect and stone masons themselves.
To learn more about this magnificent structure, read the history of the Stone Wall.
Probably not intentionally done by the stone masons, no one really knows for sure, but there are certain stones placed in just the right way that when you look at the wall for a little while, images seem to pop right out at you.
We know of ten of these images on this wall. Can you find them?
Here is a small picture of the Stone Wall behind the altar. If you click on it, a page with some bigger pictures of the wall will appear. From there you can "drill down" to a particular image and see exactly what it looks like.
The next time you're in church, take a few minutes and sit back and just look at the wall. Reflect on this magnificent structure and think of all the stones that the parishioners of the 1960's brought to this place, almost forty years ago, and how many wonderful things they've seen in all those years.
And if something just happens to pop out at you, like the duck, or the soldier, or the eyes of God, or something else, were you the first to see it? Or are you just seeing something a little bit differently, for the very first time?
Again, we're not sure if the original stone masons left these on purpose, or if they just came out during the construction of the wall.
You decide!