A resident asked if the windows could be kept for historical reasons.
View full sizeTom Bullard, head of the Scriba Water Department, displays stained glass windows that were being sold on an auction website. The windows are from a church that the town bought and turned into a community center. Oswego, NY -- Eleven stained glass windows that used to greet the Baptist faithful have received a reprieve from being auctioned online.
Windows from the old Baptist Church of Scriba Corners were on the auction block since Sept. 20 on the Auctions International website. The auction was supposed to end at about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.
But Tuesday morning, Scriba Town Supervisor Kenneth Burdick received a visit from Jon Van Wert, a Scriba resident interested in historic preservation.
Van Wert asked if the windows could be removed from the auction site and kept for historical reasons. He said he was surprised to see them on the site because he and many other people in town thought they were sold years ago.
"I’m all in favor of keeping those stained glass windows in the town of Scriba," Burdick said. "We want to keep them in the town for historical purposes."
The windows, measuring 30 inches wide by 97 inches high, are not ornate like a Tiffany window. Most have floral designs and some have names of church members at the bottom.
Town of Scriba water department chief Tom Bullard decided to put them up for auction, because the windows had been sitting, dust covered, in the town pole barn for years. He said someone told him he should try an online auction site.
"Years ago, about 20 years, a church in town here moved to another building," Bullard said. "They sold the building to the town and we use it now for our community center."
View full sizeDetail from a stained glass window that the town of Scriba was selling on an auction website. The town canceled the auction after a resident asked if they could be preserved as a historic artifact.The stained glass windows were beautiful, Bullard said, but not very energy efficient. So new ones were put in and the stained glass ones moved to the pole barn. "There were 15 in all, and we offered all of them to the Baptist church," he said. "They took four."
Scriba historian Charles D. Young said there were two Baptist churches in town back in the 1800s — the North Scriba Baptist Church and the Baptist Church of Scriba Corners.
When the two churches merged and built a new church on Route 104 about 20 years ago, the Scriba Corners building was sold to the town.
The auction site received 45 bids on the stained glass windows. Bidding began at $10 and the final bid was $4,154. There were 11 different bidders, including the Auburn Auction Gallery.
Contact Debra J. Groom at dgroom@syracuse.com, 470-3254 or 251-5586.