AMESBURY — No one knows how long the old gilded weather vane has stood atop the Main Street Congregational Church, but after harsh winds forced its dismantling last week, the push is on to determine its origins.
Building inspector Dennis Nadeau directed the antique piece be removed from the church steeple after he noticed during a drive through Amesbury on Feb. 25 that it was leaning precariously and threatening to come loose.
"The building inspector's fear was that it would fall off or break off in those winds," said church spokeswoman Lori Townsend. "The church was closed for a day or two. He was nervous about it."
Townsend said Nadeau wasn't sure what the large, three-piece structure was made of, how heavy it was, or how it was affixed to the church steeple, so he ordered it taken down. It turned out not to be made of solid copper, which would have weighed quite a bit, but could have caused a lot of damage if it had come loose in the windy weather that's been hanging around since the Feb. 25 storm.
"It's fairly large," Townsend said. "It's probably 2 to 3 feet high and 6 feet wide. It's big. The ball at the bottom alone is 2 to 3 feet high."
Everett Yates, who works for John McInnis Auctioneers and was called out to assess the value and age, said the weather vane is unique. He thinks it has its roots with the Freemasons.
"I think it's Masonic, and I think that church was a Masonic Hall," said Yates, referring to a star on the back of the weather vane that harkens back to the days when Masonic organizations were thriving in New England. "It hit a popular spell, then it dropped."
The weather vane was dislodged at a time when the Congregational church is undertaking a major renovation of its exterior and amid a push to go through the church's historic papers to document its earliest beginnings. Those papers, which were discovered in a forgotten safe in the 1970s, date back to the formation of the church in 1826 by a number of well-heeled Amesbury citizens.
While the documents have been scanned on microfiche, little has been done to compile a written history of the church, and hence there is nothing known about who the church commissioned to forge the weather vane or when. Yates said he believes the piece is a one-of-a-kind weather vane that wasn't designed by one of the larger well-known weather vane manufacturers of the day.
McInnis Auctioneers is hoping the church will seek to auction the piece through them, and Yates feels it might fetch a pretty penny given its unique markings. The market is too uncertain for him to pinpoint how much it could yield, estimating it anywhere from $7,000 to well beyond that depending on the kinds of buyers interested in Masonic pieces.
"It's awful hard to tell because I've never seen one exactly like it," Yates said. "They sold a Gabriel in Newburyport for a lot of money, but it was the only Gabriel known."
The Gabriel Yates spoke of was sold for $100,000 at auction, having come from the top of the Universalist Church on Pleasant Street. That piece was a style of weather vane that typically generates high interest from bidders, Yates said. But with antiquities like this one, anything can happen, he said.
"You can estimate things, but if you get people at an auction competing, and you get 100 people that want it, you never know," he said. "We sold a stag estimated at $15,000 to $20,000. It got $85,000. Estimates are merely estimates. That particular weather vane is probably the only one like it, so it's a wild guess what it will bring."
Townsend said the original documentation for the church building is missing, leaving little information about the process parishioners went through to erect their own meetinghouse.
"The people that started the church started gathering in 1826," she said. "I know it started out as a small Colonial building, then in Victorian times, they added the big steeple and the columns out in the front."
Townsend welcomes input from the public on the origins of the weather vane.
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