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Chapel

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1938–1939, G. Morris Whiteside II

This frame chapel in Colonial Revival style was partly funded by the WPA and built by seventy-two workers. It featured a modernist novelty, the first “color organ” installed in a church. Designed in the 1930s by Mary Hallock Greenewalt, known as a “pioneer in color music,” it was meant to enthrall mental patients with the sight of colors flowing through long glass tubes rising from behind an altar made of structural glass as well as through lamps in niches in the walls. This experiment seems to have been shortlived, as the interior was redesigned and given a conventional wooden altar, reredos arch, iron railing, and cork floor (1955–1956, Victorine and Samuel Homsey).

Writing Credits

Author: 
W. Barksdale Maynard
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Citation

W. Barksdale Maynard, "Chapel", [New Castle, Delaware], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/DE-01-NC1.1.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Delaware

Buildings of Delaware, W. Barksdale Maynard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008, 147-148.

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