Holland College graduate replicates part of Island church's history

A Holland College graduate is helping to restore a piece of woodwork found in the basement of St. Paul's Church in Charlottetown.

It's called a finialand looks like a star surrounded by a circle.It is believed to have once sat on top of the church.

After discovering it in the basement, the church contacted Holland College's heritage retrofit carpentry program.

"Our program works really hard to restore and maintain heritage buildings, both commercial and residential, and this is right up our alley," said Josh Silver, the learning manager for the program.

The original was in rough shape and the church is still looking into when it was the cap on top of St. Paul's.

Theywill be celebrating their 250th anniversary in 2019, so there arequite a few records to go through.

Holland College graduate Kelly Caseley made tworeplicas of the original finial, spending more than 100 hours on the project.

"There is no right angles on this piece, it is all angles and circles and triangles so there is a lot of math and a lot of geometry involved in it," she said,"I have access to this shop with everything I could imagine. Lots of electric tools, band saws, skill saws, those sorts of things and that wasn't necessarilyavailable when this was originally created."

Silver said the students "grey the line between a craft person and an artisan."

"It's part of our history," he said."It's part of our culture and everybody regardless of your faith can appreciate the esthetic beauty of it and we're just fortunate that someone had the foresight decades ago to store it away in some place that was kept safe."

Silver says the replica will be put in place at a special ceremony at St. Paul's on New Year's Eve while theoriginal will go on display in the church.

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