Blandford Church and Cemetery: Tiffany Glass and Thirty Thousand Graves

On the highest hill in Petersburg stands a small brick church that has outlasted the town that once surrounded it, the war that nearly destroyed it, and every attempt to leave it to ruin. Blandford Church was built between seventeen thirty-five and seventeen thirty-seven, an Anglican house of worship on ground that had been used as a burial place since seventeen hundred and two. By the time the Civil War reached Petersburg, the church had been abandoned for decades and stood open to the elements.

During the Siege of Petersburg it served as a Confederate receiving hospital. After the war it sat empty again, slowly deteriorating on its hilltop overlooking the old cemetery. Then the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg took it in hand. Founded on May sixth, eighteen sixty-six, the organization claimed to be perhaps the oldest continuous non-church-related women's organization in the United States. They had spent the years after the war gathering the remains of Confederate dead from the battlefields around the city and reburying them in Blandford Cemetery. Thirty thousand Confederate soldiers rest there now, in one hundred eighty-nine acres of rolling ground, the third largest cemetery in Virginia.

In nineteen oh one the city authorized the Ladies Memorial Association to restore the church as a permanent memorial. They commissioned something extraordinary: Louis Comfort Tiffany and his studios designed fifteen stained glass windows, eleven for the Confederate states, two for border states, and two further memorial windows. Each window was created and installed between nineteen oh one and nineteen twelve. No other church in America holds a complete set of Tiffany windows commissioned as a unified artistic and commemorative program.

The windows glow in shades of amber and blue, each one paid for by a different Southern state, each one bearing the name of a Tiffany studio as its maker. The little brick church on the hill became, against all probability, one of the finest repositories of American decorative art in the South.