A mighty white oak spreads its shade across the lawn behind the former St. Elisabeth’s Episcopal Church on Old Brownsville Road. Roughly a century old, it is home to more than a hundred species, from agile Grey squirrels to worker ants tracing yards of Virginia creeper. This tree sustains life.
It once had a sister tree, cleared for construction in 2012. The Reverend Bill Murray was Rector when the parish built a new church near the northeast corner of St. Columba land. Hord Architects designed the building to sit right where the sister tree stood.
When the great oak was felled, Reverend Bill’s father Seldon Murray commissioned the wood to be made into an altar table according to plans of the original concrete altar at the church on Yale Road, an homage to tradition. A local arborist cut the lumber, and it dried for weeks in a kiln.
“The wood was so hard, it dulled the sawblades. A number of us in the congregation tried to work it, backyard setups and such, but it was just too hard,” says Seldon Murray. He contacted Jim Cole of The Woodwork Shop in Bartlett, who with owner Joe Harriman, planed the raw lumber.
“The arches were cut and inlay was all done by a CNC computer-controlled machine, according to their plans. We glued it all up, did the router work and stained it,” says Harriman. “It was a really fun project.”
Cole was astounded by the finished product. “Everything you make is out of square, off by just a little,” he says. “You take a tape measure from one corner diagonal to the opposite corner, then measure the other side, corner to opposite corner. If it’s exact, then it’s square. And it was perfect. God did that.”
When Reverend Murray placed the altar table in the sanctuary, he was stunned. It stood in the exact spot where the tree had once grown. Over the years, hundreds of parishioners knelt near the altar for communion.
After St. Elisabeth’s closed in 2019, the property sold twice over. Two years ago, St. Columba staff visited the new owners who were clearing things out and found the altar table abandoned in the nave, warped and cracked.
“They said if we could move it, we could have it,” says Matthew Arehart, Associate Executive Director of St. Columba, “so we loaded it up, along with the lectern and some prayer books, and brought it all back here.”
Cole and Harriman repaired the damage and restored the finish to its original brilliance. Now the altar overlooks the forest through the massive bay window in the chapel of Scheibler Lodge. Hundreds continue to gather before it in times of prayer.
Like its sister growing tall just across the woods, this tree too, sustains life.
