Silver Creek, Saint Thomas

We see here the Church of Saint Thomas, Silver Creek in the Deanery of West Quebec, as photographed by Brian Glenn on 7 May 2009.  Saint Thomas’s Church is notable in itself for being one of the smaller houses of worship in the Diocese of Ottawa.  That by no means is the end of its distinctions.

In 1863 the Mission of Buckingham consisted of three townships: Buckingham, Templeton and Lochaber where outside of Buckingham villages’ services were held in schoolhouses.  In 1875, Mr. Joseph C. Storey donated a free grant of land to the Reverend W.C. Clarke of Buckingham to build a church at Silver Creek in Lochaber Township.  In 1876, other Protestant denominations chipped in to help build “the log church of Saint Thomas in Lochaber.”

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We interrupt our narrative to wonder what happened to that log church, for it clearly cannot be the building we see here.  If this were a log building, the windows could not be so large and so numerous.  Even as we wonder what happened between the building of a log house of worship and the construction of this light, airy frame structure, we note that on 18 February 1879, Saint Thomas’s Church was consecrated by Bishop William Bennett Bond of Montreal.

This modest size church, with Thomas as patron saint, provides two major clues that its founders feared its future might be doubtful.  And yet, unlike many larger churches built in more remote or isolated locations, Saint Thomas’s did not endure the fate of being shunted around from one multi-point parish to another, as bishops attempted to resolve the conundrum of an undersupply of clergy with an oversupply of churches.  From its founding until 1996, Silver Creek consistently was one of a select number of stations in the Parish of Buckingham.

This house of worship, almost by definition, could not have been built on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River.  True, many carpenter gothic churches were built in Ontario in the 1870s utilizing board-and-batten, but the complex line of side gables along the two side walls was a Quebec anomaly, with numerous examples in West Quebec.  The only example on the Ontario side of the river was at Saint James’s Church, Perth where, as an afterthought, when the original  high walls were cut down, such gables were used to accommodate the already built tall windows.

It is Silver Creek’s casement windows that pique our curiosity.  By the time Saint Thomas’s was built, casement windows had fallen out of favour in favour of sashes that slid up and down, to hold screens keeping out flying insects.  The two North American traditions of casement windows were those made by Québecois craftsmen (opening into the building) and those made by New England craftsmen (opening outward) such as those at Silver Creek.  The casements of Saint Thomas’s Church are unusual for having an arch in the window itself.

In 1996, Saint George’s Church, Gatineau joined the parish.  The new three-point parish was renamed Buckingham-Gatineau, to change in 1997 to the Parish of the Eastern Outaouais.

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