All Saints, Nepean, elevation by T. Fuller — Ottawa West Deanery

What does Napanee have to do with the Diocese of Ottawa?

Forty years ago, when the writer carried out research at the Anglican Diocese of Ontario Archives in Kingston, he came across this sketch. It was identified as an elevation of All Saints Church, Napanee. Sometimes researchers can be a bother to archivists. Or so it seems. On this occasion, the researcher was assured by the archivist in Kingston that it was so labelled because the architect who sketched the elevation in 1865—one Thomas Fuller—had labelled it All Saint’s, Napanee. And anyway, she followed up, why was a researcher of church architecture in the Diocese of Ottawa even looking at this? After all, what does Napanee have to do with the Diocese of Ottawa?

For two reasons, the obstreperous researcher answered back. First, there was no record of there ever being an All Saints Church in Napanee. And, second, what was actually scribbled on the bottom of the sketch was “All Saints, Napaen,” clearly a miswriting of “All Saints, Nepean” or what was the original All Saints Church, Westboro built in the neighbourhood where Thomas Fuller resided while at work designing and overseeing construction of the original Centre Block of Parliament in the early 1860s. The upshot of this correction was that this sketch was transferred to the Diocese of Ottawa Archives within a few years.

Clearly, Thomas Fuller when designing this house of worship was aware of new ideas about how churches should look. While All Saints was being built, a Hand Book to the Parliamentary and Departmental Buildings stated, “Ottawa is somewhat behind in Ecclesiastical Architecture;…from some cause or other there is no English Episcopal Church worthy of the place, nor any present prospect of so desirable an addition to Ottawa’s Ecclesiastical Buildings.”  With All Saints built some five miles outside the city boundaries, Fuller in this church was making a statement about building more up-to-date churches.

Fuller’s design for All Saints, Nepean had the seated congregation facing east toward Jerusalem during devotions, a feature unprecedented in earlier Anglican churches in Ottawa. His sketch shows iron decorative cresting lining the ridge of the roof, with that above the chancel being more prominent and more ornate than that atop the rest of the church. Fuller also added pinnacles to the peaks of all gables and cresting atop the side gables, vestry and entrance porch.

Notably, there was no tower, the traditional expression of being an established church strongly linked to the British state. Fuller decided to add to the visual variegation or complexity of both interior and exterior by having a small number of large side windows extending up above the low side roofline into their own gables. The small timber porch seems not to have been built, as being inappropriate to Canadian winters, and an enclosed stone porch was put up instead.

The roof that Fuller placed on the bell-côte along with the roofs he designed for the vestry and entrance porch suggest the lingering influence of his design for the Centre Block of Parliament, melding Second Empire mansard roofs with pointed Gothic Revival arches. The cock atop the belfry is a symbol of vigilance (crowing for the dawn), Resurrection (as Christ rose ‘very early in the morning’) and repentance (as in Peter after denying Christ, weeping bitterly).

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