Angels on high Sculptures return to perch atop former Lille church

loading...

In the northernmost part of the state, Route 1 isn’t filled with car dealerships, McDonald’s and motels. After Caribou, it stretches up and rolls languidly along the banks of the St. John River, passing through towns that seem untouched by time. There’s the occasional Irving station, convenience store, diner-style restaurant. The houses are modest and neat. The traffic is anything but bumper-to-bumper, even in the summer. There’s little to distract you from the pure beauty of the valley, a patchwork of farmland sloping gently toward the river that meanders through it. Little, that is, except the churches.

They stand out like giants beside the road, reaching their steeples and vaults and domes toward the heavens. In each town, the Catholic churches dominate the landscape, even more so in winter, when the snow-coated hills melt into a milky gray sky. With little to mark the transition from one village to the next, the churches serve as important landmarks in the Maine way of giving directions. If you ask someone how to get to Lille from Madawaska, they’ll say you can’t miss it. Just look for the angels.

Even in the cold, snow-buffered sunlight of February, the golden angels on the former Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel church glow like beacons from miles away. Perched 80 feet above the ground, atop domes on the church’s twin towers, Gabriel and Michel stand with wings spread, trumpets raised. They welcome visitors to what is now Le Muse? et Centre Culturel

du Mont-Carmel, a museum and center for Acadian culture. But for the last 15 years, there were no angels to serve as a welcoming committee or a landmark.

In 1985, one of the church’s two original angels was ready to fall off. Time, wind and rain had made its perch a bit precarious. The angels are made of wood covered in tin and lead, and their weight strained the supporting domes. So both were taken down and placed in the museum while their caretaker awaited funding to replace them with something lighter. The originals would remain inside.

“We knew we had something big, so we knew we had to do it right,” said Don Cyr, who lives in the former rectory and has devoted the past two decades to restoring the church and surrounding buildings to their original grandeur. “These angels are exact copies of the originals.”

In 1908, parishioners at Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel commissioned Louis Jobin, a premier sculptor from Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre, to carve the angels. They were meant to be the crowning jewels on the church, designed by French architect Theophile Daoust and completed in 1909.

“When they built it they were conscious of building the most beautiful church in the valley,” Cyr said of the structure, a blend of ancient Roman architecture with a French Baroque exterior. “They were very conscious that it was a French church and it was the most outstanding one around.”

Cyr knew the architecture of the church was special, but it wasn’t until 1985 that he found out how important the angels were as works of art, rather than just decoration. That year, Le Muse? de Quebec was preparing an exhibit of Jobin’s work. A representative from the museum contacted Cyr after coming across records stating that Jobin was, in fact, the sculptor of Lille’s angels.

“[Jobin] was the finest sculptor in Quebec in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” Cyr said. “He did a lot of important works. That’s why we wanted to be sure to re-create them exactly.”

Although the curator found the records too late for the angels to be included in the show, Cyr picked up a few ideas of how to replicate the angels from the museum. For the exhibit, the museum borrowed the original Jobin angels from churches and created fiberglass replicas as temporary replacements. Even after the exhibit was over, all of the churches chose to keep the replicas outdoors and display the original sculptures indoors, where they wouldn’t be exposed to the elements.

Cyr knew the Lille angels needed to be recast so the originals could stay indoors. He also knew it would take awhile to raise the necessary money. In addition to his involvement with Le Muse? et Centre Culturel du Mont-Carmel and a 20-hour-a-week commitment to the Maine Acadian Heritage Council, he also teaches history and art at the Houlton center of the University of Maine at Presque Isle, a solid two-hour commute from Lille. That doesn’t leave him much time to raise funds.

A matching grant from the Maine Community Foundation got the project started – it would pay for restoration of the church’s windows if Cyr matched the amount by re-creating the angels. Armed with advice from a parish in Quebec whose fiberglass angels blew off the roof immediately after they were put up, Cyr decided to use cement. He hired Glenn Hines of Houlton to cast them, but what worked for a stone church in Quebec wouldn’t work for a wooden church in Maine. The angels were too heavy for the wooden domes to support, so Cyr headed back to the drawing board.

“It’s like putting a grand piano on top of the dome,” Cyr said. “More than that, really.”

With the help of a grant from the Acadian Heritage Council and private donations, Cyr raised more than $20,000 to cast the angels in a lighter material, paint them and put them back up. In the summer of 1999, the project began in earnest, when the cultural and historical society hired Eric Joseph, a sculptor from Hebron, to make basic casts of the angels in epoxy and fiberglass. That winter, the angels were sanded and finished by Terry Helms of Limestone, who has helped Cyr with much of the restoration work on the church.

Inside, the angels are supported with a framework of stainless steel, and Madawaska Fire Chief Norman Cyr, who owns a welding shop, advised Cyr on how to attach the replicas to the domes so they wouldn’t fall off.

“He came up and looked at it and gave us the plan,” Don Cyr said.

In September 2000, Cyr and Helms returned the angels to the domes, securing them to 6-by-6-foot beams that run up the towers. Norman Cyr welded steel supports to the angels that would serve as an anchor for the bolts. Once the angels were up, however, the real work began.

“Painting them was a bigger deal than putting them up,” Don Cyr said. “Gold paint is difficult.”

It took a long time for Cyr to find the right paint. It would cost too much to gold-leaf the angels, and it would have to be releafed every 15 years. But “gold” paint is usually made with bronze flakes, which tarnish over time. Cyr finally found a new concoction of real gold suspended in acrylic. It won’t tarnish, it’s waterproof, it expands and contracts with temperature fluctuations, and it costs $110 a gallon – expensive, but not as expensive as gold leaf. The paint is transparent, so the angels needed to be primed with yellow paint.

“With the yellow base, the light reflects back more brilliantly,” Cyr said.

The domes were covered with steel, so they needed to be primed with a rust inhibitor, then a coat of yellow paint, then two coats of gold, like the angels.

It was hard work. For starters, Helms did the painting after the angels were secured to the towers – on an 80-foot lift. He used a spray gun, and the gold flakes clogged the sprayer. It wasn’t exactly fun, but after awhile, it got a little easier.

“We got the hang of it,” Cyr said. “We didn’t waste any paint, believe me.”

The paint and primer alone cost more than $4,000, and they only had enough money to paint down 20 feet. Cyr plans to rent a 60-foot lift next summer to finish the job.

For now, the towers look a little unusual, with a bright strip of yellow underneath the golden angels, but Cyr would rather do the job right than do it quickly. He and Helms are the only men on the job until the funding comes through for more workers, both on the interior and exterior restoration, and they’re content to work slowly and precisely.

“We’re restoring it to the way it was when it was built,” Cyr said. “We haven’t skimped at all. We haven’t used cheaper materials that would’ve cost less. We’ve really been doing the best work we could possibly do with it. If you just do something that’s half-baked, you end up with a cake that doesn’t taste too good.”

In time, Cyr hopes to restore the entire property to its original glory so it will be a continuing source of pride to the Acadian community. Much work still needs to be done, but the former church is functional.

Its near-perfect acoustics make it a favorite place for musicians to play. There’s plenty of space – the church seats 700 – for Acadian antiquities and historical documents to be displayed. And in the basement, there’s an intimate little theater for musical or theatrical productions.

“If you’re restoring a building, it has to have a purpose,” Cyr said. “If it doesn’t have a purpose, it’s just a decoration.”