ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702140084
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE
The weather was classic Gothic - damp and gloomy - but nobody seemed to mind.
On the morning St. Andrews Catholic Church was dedicated, the big yellow church on the hill was packed with people.
It was 1902. Roanoke was a booming railroad town; its population had soared, from several hundred in the early 1880s to more than 20,000 a short generation later.
And the crowds that morning notwithstanding, St. Andrews was hardly the only church in town - even then. In fact, a 1903 city church directory lists 20 of them.
Still, people had been watching the unusual church rise above them for months.
There was nothing else like it in Roanoke.
Because if other churches had Gothic touches, St. Andrews was the whole package. It had three doors in front, just like the great cathedrals of Europe, and a big rose window above. It had twin towers that soared 161 feet above an already prominent Gainsboro hill.
And it was big - very big - with room for 800 worshipers.
But on that Sunday in 1902, it was not big enough. St. Andrews was jam-packed for its dedication - not just with Catholics, but Roanokers of all denominations, many of them playing hooky from their own church services to get a peek inside.
How big an event was it? Consider that the church had issued tickets. And that, despite its huge capacity, extra seats had been set up in the aisles.
The Roanoke Times, writing about the dedication later, positively gushed. "Never perhaps in the history of Roanoke has so much genuine interest been evinced in an event of a religious character," a reporter wrote - adding that the new church was "probably the most handsome church edifice in the South."
If it was overstatement, it was understandable.
St. Andrews - perhaps the most Gothic of all Roanoke's Gothic churches - is a spectacular presence still, dazzling travelers on I-581.
It could only have been more impressive in 1902. With its twin towers and commanding position atop an otherwise empty Gainsboro hill, St. Andrews must have seemed to the young, aspiring railroad town proof it had at last arrived.
And perhaps it had. As Hollins College professor W.L. "Tony" Whitwell has written, the twin spires of St. Andrews "rose with Roanoke."
The city had been incorporated only 20 years before, as the population grew around the junction of the Shenandoah Valley and the Norfolk & Western railways. Early meetings of the young town's Catholics were held by a circuit-riding priest in a railroad car.
The Rev. John William Lynch - Father Lynch - was based in Lexington at the time, but he soon was named Roanoke's first resident priest.
An energetic man with piercing, deep-set eyes and, apparently, a way of getting things done, he was still in his early 30s when he first came to Roanoke. Margaret Cochener, who wrote a history of St. Andrews, "On The Hill," said the priest used to breeze through the houses of church members on his way from the church to the business district, entering by the front door and chatting for a moment or two before exiting by the back.
Perhaps his finest hour came on the morning of the July 2, 1889, train wreck at Thaxton in Bedford County - when a Norfolk & Western passenger train plunged off the track into a stream bed at a washed-out culvert, then caught fire. Father Lynch hitched a ride on the relief train, and ministered to the injured and dying. At least 15 people lost their lives, according to news accounts - many burning to death as they lay trapped beneath debris.
By the time Father Lynch left Roanoke, over the objections of his congregation, for a new parish in Harper's Ferry, W.Va., in 1910, his legacy was there for all to see.
Upon his death, in Greensboro, N.C., in 1926, Father Lynch's body was returned to Roanoke - to be buried on the grassy slope in front of his church on the hill.
* * *
St. Andrews was the immigrant church. Patterned after the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, it was an example of the kind of church often built in this country by Catholic immigrants, said Whitwell, the Hollins professor who wrote a book about Roanoke architecture.
"Some people sarcastically call it `Catholic Gothic,''' Whitwell said of the style. Wherever the churches appear, he said, "They represent immigrant populations - Irish, Italian, Polish, middle Europeans who were Catholics ...
Built by first-generation Americans - many of them Irish - who arrived here with the railroad, St. Andrews' roots show in its stained glass windows. One of the largest depicts St. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, holding a shamrock.
Other windows, all of them bought from a German glassmaking firm when the church was built, depict saints from Spain, France, Italy and elsewhere. One window features both St. Elizabeth of Hungary and Mexico's Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The church was designed by an Ohio architect, William Ginther, in the High Victorian Gothic style, according to Whitwell. High Victorian, a style of Gothic Revival architecture that owes much to the ideas of the famous 19th-century British art critic John Ruskin, stresses the use of color from natural sources - thus St. Andrews' arresting yellow/blond brick exterior.
The brick and stone for St. Andrews were quarried in Ohio. The church, according to news accounts of 1902, is 137 feet long and 52 feet wide. Its towers rise 161 feet. The original altarpiece - 126 feet across - was built by one John B. Mullan of Baltimore. An 8-foot marble statue of St. Andrew above the church door, holding the X-shaped cross of his crucifixion, was carved in Italy and has been there only since 1960.
The church was built in two years by Roanoke contractor John J. Garry - an Irish-born Roanoker who also built the city's picturesque Gothic post office (now gone), which featured eight gargoyles on its watchtower. St. Andrews, alas, has no gargoyles.
Garry died of heart disease in 1905.
His funeral service at St. Andrews, presided over by Father Lynch, attracted more people to the church than at any time since its dedication, reported the Roanoke Evening News - adding that hundreds were turned away.
Nearly a century later, the church still has a hold on people's hearts.
A few years back, a frequent visitor to Roanoke wrote a letter to the editor of the Roanoke Times, decrying plans to demolish the Hotel Roanoke. "Who can imagine Roanoke without its most famous landmark?" he asked.
Another letter writer fired back a reply a week later:
"Even if the Hotel Roanoke were to disappear, the city's most famous landmark would remain," wrote the Rev. William O'Brien, an ex-Roanoker living in Waynesboro. "There is no building in the beautiful city of Roanoke that can compare to the one that sits on the hill."
LENGTH: Long : 122 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON STAFF. 1. St. Andrews Catholic Church isby CNBpatterned on the great European cathedrals. 2. The rose window of
St. Andrews. color. 3. (headshot) Lynch.