The bell of Glenora

Waiting for the ferry at Young’s Point in Adolphustown, the bisque waters of the bay anchor the shaggy crest of North Marysburg in Prince Edward County. A dusting of snow reveals the hidden places of the long bolt of limestone that climbs 30 storeys high to the plateau of Lake of the Mountain. Peaking through the treed canopy is the spire of Glenora United Church, a beacon to mariners since 1876.

On a Sunday evening in June, 1944, the sounds of a choir and a pump organ carried over Picton Bay. Inside the church, newly painted benches were ‘jammed right full’ while in the aisles men and women stood shoulder to shoulder. The guest speaker for the occasion was Wallace Havelock Robb, a writer, poet and historian. He read a poem and spoke about the previous decade when the Glenora church had fallen onto hard times and had closed. Robb talked about the many who had laboured to give the place a second chance. He singled out a then-24- year-old student from Queen’s University.

“I was married with a young son when I decided to go back to school. At Albert College I met students who were studying theology and I saw it as a direction for myself. While at Queen’s the Belleville Presbytery sent me here…it was in September of 1943,” George Teskey recalls as we sit in a corner pew of the church of today. A quiet light and soft patter of melting snow on the tin roof fills the interior.

“I walked up the front steps and the door was swinging open in the wind on one hinge,” he continues. “Many of the windows were smashed out …there was a box stove at the back and the pipes ran all the way to the front. Birds had nested on top and there was rabbit scat everywhere…it was a mess,” he adds. “Even though it was derelict, people… tourists would leave money on the altar,” George adds.

During the time of the closure of the Glenora landmark, the nearby churches at Waupoos, Cressy and Bongards remained active. “We had a ‘young peoples’ group from those churches. They said why don’t we clean up the church and have one service a year,” George tells me. “When those around here saw them working, they joined in asking for services all year round…they really took a hold of it.”

George describes the family farm at Hubbs Creek and the many jobs he has held in the County, including delivering mail and firing the boilers of the canneries and the mushroom plant. He then shares a little known story. “While at school, Glenora became my Ministry…” he begins. “Back then the church didn’t have a bell,” he goes on. “There was a pipe from Lake on the Mountain that fed a water turbine down below which provided electricity for the fish hatchery and also for the families who lived on top of the hill. They were building an abutment to stabilize the pipe at the bottom and were gathering scrap iron to add to the concrete to strengthen it when some workers discovered a bell in the vacant foundry,” George pauses. “They were about to add it to the concrete when a few of us heard about it and went down…we were told it had been cast there.” George then details how a short time later, the ‘lost bell of Glenora’ found a home, high in the steeple on the mountain.

The Ministry of George Teskey has included parishes throughout Canada and within the prisons. After retiring from the church, George and his wife Bessie Irene spent 14 years working with the poor and orphaned of El Salvador in Central America. Through it all, a continuous tie to Glenora remains. “While I haven’t taken a service here in quite a while I come up now and then…especially on the anniversaries. Waupoos and Bongards churches have been closed and torn down but here…this past year they have redecorated and painted …they have done a fine job in keeping the place up…they have been very faithful.”

Before leaving I ask about special moments. “Standing up there…” George gestures to the pulpit, “…with the doors open in the summer you almost felt like the service was outside…the air would come in and you would watch the boats going down the Long Reach far below.” He takes in the room. “We have been very close to this place…it is almost like being at home.”

Plaques and photos are mounted above benches worn from years of prayer; an upright piano rests in the shadows while an electronic keyboard sits front row centre; eight pressed-back chairs line the wall awaiting the choir. I gaze beyond the tall windows where the Lake of the Mountain lies still; in a neighbour’s yard a clothesline is hung with sheets and pairs of socks. Far in the distance across the Reach is the low shore of Adolphustown, where on any given Sunday the bell of Glenora can still be heard.