St. Nicholas in July

Sunny and mild all day. Up early to the smell of pancakes and freshly ground coffee. Hubby likes to make pancakes occasionally. He had changed the oil in my car before that. I worked on more butterfly bush deadheading and helped him put up our screen tent so he could wipe it off after the trip. I headed to the formal garden and began work on cleaning the hammock patio. He finished the harder work on the patio and put down more mulch. We cleaned up and grabbed a burger on the way to the base to exchange some wine. I was hoping to go inside this church to take a picture of the crucifix behind the altar but it was locked. Here’s some info I found on line at dcmilitary.com which cited the following sources: NAS Patuxent River Command History; National Register of Historic Places Registration Form; Martha Bowers, historian; March 1984 Chronicles of St. Mary’s, Monthly Bulletin of the St. Mary’s County Historical Society.
“St. Nicholas Chapel, located at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, is the only DoD chapel that had its beginnings as a Roman Catholic mission, then church, and since World War II, has been a Navy military chapel. The current concrete chapel was built in 1916 but the parish of St. Nicholas goes back much further. While the Jesuits began holding worship services nearby as far back as the late 1630s, the consecration of St. Nicholas Church did not happen at its present-day site until May 6, 1796. Part of an English Catholic Jesuit mission, it served the surrounding towns and farming communities, all of which vanished when the Navy acquired the land in 1942 to build the naval air station during World War II. The church was named after the patron saint of Nicholas Sewell, head of one the area’s leading families and owner of Mattapany Plantation. Interestingly, given the later fate of the church, St. Nicholas also happens to be the patron saint of sailors. The cast concrete blocks used in building the current chapel, an Arts and Crafts-style structure, were made by local bricklayer Nealy Milburn on the Patuxent River shore and hauled to the site by an ox and horse team. Begun in 1915, with the cornerstone laid Dec. 19 of that same year, the new church was finished by the end of 1916. Without the services of a fulltime priest, parish membership dwindled and the Catholic congregation celebrated its final mass in the chapel on June 14, 2015, although a rosary prayer group still meets each weekday. Protestant services continue with worship in the chapel each Sunday. The life-size 3,000 pound marble crucifix that dominates the sanctuary was installed in 1945. It was the work of a young naval combat artist, Seaman 2nd Class Felix de Weldon, who was stationed at Pax River in 1944 and who subsequently achieved fame as the sculptor of the Iowa Jima Memorial in Arlington, Virginia”. You can Google the chapel to see a photograph of the Crucifix. My sister and BIL stopped by to bring a table to put out by my garden bench. They joined us for dinner and a pleasant evening. Thanks for dropping by.