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 One of the most beautifully carved fonts to survive from colonial Virginia, the font at Christ Church features cherubs' heads on the rim of the bowl and acanthus leaves at its base. Visible to the left is one of the cracks made when the font was broken sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century. |
Bishop William Meade called Christ Church's font "the largest and most beautiful I ever saw." It is original to the church and one of about ten to survive from colonial Virginia. The font is carved of a gray-veined marble. Its circular bowl stands atop a marble pedestal and features beautiful carvings of cherubs' heads around the rim and acanthus leaves encircling the base. When Meade made his comments on the font in 1837, it was still intact. By July 1878, however, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine observed “the baptismal font of white marble has become separated from its pedestal by the rusting of the iron dowel which joined them, and now rests upon the [communion] table.” Historian William Stanard, writing in 1902, also stated the font had been broken, noting it now “requires a skilled hand to place together the four pieces into which some savages (said to have been a party of drunken sailors) have broken it.” |
| Captain William T. Chase, senior warden of the vestry of Christ Church in the late nineteenth century, eventually took the broken font and stored it at Grace Episcopal in Kilmarnock. It remained there until the early twentieth century, when Miss Anna Clarke, a Ball family member who spent summers in Irvington and took a lead role in several important preservation projects at Christ Church, had the font repaired in Baltimore. Traditionally, fonts were set near the west door, or main entrance, signifying one’s entry into the church by way of baptism. Canon laws of 1604 refer to placing the font “in the ancient usual places,” meaning by the west door. Presbyterians, Puritans and other dissenting groups, however, preferred the east end, and there likely existed some variance, too, among Anglican parish churches in colonial Virginia. While we have no written records from Christ Church Parish in the colonial period indicating where the font may have stood, Bishop Meade observed in 1844 that a “baptismal pew…with its elaborately wrought marble font and canopy” stood at the “opposite entrance” from the chancel, thus placing it somewhere near the west door at this point. Photographs from the 1920-30s show it in the chancel area, where it continues to stand today. |
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