Saturday, May 30, 1998

Church's art is resurrected

By REBEKAH SCOTT / Toledo Blade

MILLER CITY, Ohio -- A hidden treasure, a revelation. Lightning bolts, tornadoes, destruction. Artwork long-forgotten, moldering through decades in a dark attic.

It's dramatic and it's true, a tale that played out against a background of the fields and barns of this rural community. The action centers on St. Nicholas Church, the big brick building that looms over this little crossroads town.

Steve Blankemeier was chairman of the renovations committee at St. Nicholas in October 1995. A three-year renovation project was in full swing, and at the center of the hard work was the abandoned rectory next door to the Roman Catholic church. Today, the Rev. Robert DeSloover lives in the refurbished home, but three years ago the two-story, 1910-model house was a mess.

"We had to put a furnace unit in the attic, so we cleared out lots of odds and ends from up there -- Venetian blinds, stained drapes," Blankemeier recalled. "And in that pile outside the back door was what looked like a rolled-up piece of linoleum, tied with twine. It all sat outside for several days. Lucky for us, it didn't rain."

Blankemeier and his friend, Carl Lehman, were ready to knock off working for the night. Lehman carried the roll into the dining room. "Let's see what this is," he said.

The men slowly unrolled the stiff cylinder. "We were very careful, because in one place, it had made a crease, and became a tear. And lo and behold, here was this portrait, all dirty and dark," Blankemeier said.

"It was wonderful. We thought, 'Wow, where did this come from? How long has it been up there?' We couldn't see any artist's name on it. Carl knew (the man portrayed) was St. Nicholas. ... We right away rolled it up and put it back in the attic."

Word about the picture traveled through the neighborhood, but no one remembered seeing it, said DeSloover, pastor at St. Nicholas and Holy Family Church in nearby New Cleveland. "We assumed another St. Nicholas parish must have given it to us at some point."

After a few months passed, DeSloover had what he called "a revelation" while shuffling through some old parish paperwork.

"This parish had a rough beginning," he explained. The original 1888 St. Nicholas Church boasted a 60-foot steeple, the pride of the 30 sturdy German families who built it. Ten years later, a bolt of lightning struck the church during Sunday Mass. The church burned to the ground, but all escaped unhurt. Undeterred, 65 families of Vennekotters, Nieses, Nienbergs, and Riepenhoffs built a new church twice the size, "of brick in a Gothic design." They were proud enough of its splendid interior to commission a photograph.

Twenty years later, a tornado roared in from the east. The church was again destroyed.

"They rebuilt again, the building we have now," DeSloover said. "Putnam County gets lots of tornadoes and storms. But two times in 20 years, you have to wonder!"

Seventy-nine years after rebuilders tucked the tornado-damaged altar painting into the rectory attic, DeSloover saw it again, in the pre-tornado photograph. The puzzle of the portrait's past was solved.

In the photo, the St. Nicholas painting stands over the altar, instead of the Byzantine Christ and angels of post-1919 vintage.

And on March 1, after an extended visit to a restorer and custom framer in Toledo, St. Nicholas's portrait finally made it back to the church. Today it stands in the back of the building, overlooking the choir loft, cleaned, flattened and lit up in all its former glory.

A little mystery still clings to the picture, Blankemeier said. The artist who painted it remains unknown.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)