EASTERN

Pease Auditorium

After decades in storage, two stained glass panels donated by Frederic Pease are now on display in Pease Auditorium.

Josephine Dolsen Pease was just 37 when she died, leaving behind five children. Her husband, Frederic H. Pease, was the popular chairman of the music department at Michigan State Normal College, now Eastern Michigan University.

She was a pretty doe-eyed girl with cascades of dark curly hair, studying piano in the Normal College conservatory, when she married her music teacher in 1859. Upon her death, the newspaper The Ypsilantian noted her “loveliness of face and character.”

After her death, Frederic Pease donated a stained glass window to Ypsilanti’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in her memory. The couple had been married in the church and were members throughout their life together. Built in 1858, the church still stands on Huron Street.

Josephine’s window consisted of three stacked panels in sunny orange and yellow geometric patterns. A lily in somber blue and green graces the top arched panel and the bottom panel is inscribed, “In Memory of Josephine Dolsen Pease 1840-1877.”

It was common practice for the bereaved to donate ornate and expensive stained glass windows to churches like St. Luke’s. Walk into the church today and the towering arched windows all bear plaques of dedication on the windowsills below them. But these grand old windows are not the originals; most were installed in the 1940s to replace the aging 19th century windows that preceded them.

Josephine’s window had been removed even earlier, in the 1920s, when an addition to the church required replacing its spot with a doorway. The window was stored in the attic until the rector, JoAnn Kennedy Slater, discovered it while taking inventory of the church’s historical treasures in 2001.

“The panels were beautiful and they were just lying around,” recalls Slater. “With St. Luke’s long history of being good neighbors with EMU, we decided the Pease memorial window needed to be put back in service.”

With the help of two members of the St. Luke’s congregation—EMU Associate Professor of History John McCurdy and Marcia McCrary, an amateur historian and president of theGenealogical Society of Washtenaw—Slater approached EMU about donating the panels in honor of the 100th anniversary of Pease Auditorium.

EMU’s Vice President for Operations and Facilities John Donegan and Director of the Convocation Center Mark Monahan first saw the panels in October 2014.

“Donegan decided right away that we had to do something with them,” says Monahan. EMU physical plant employees created a box to transport the windows and two former usher annexes in Pease were retrofitted as display cases, all in time for the anniversary.

“So many students, faculty and staff have walked through our doors, including Frederic and Josephine Pease,” says Slater. “We were so glad we could honor their memory by donating the windows.”

The top and bottom panels of the original window are on either side of Pease’s main lobby in their custom-made cases and a plaque in the lobby describes their history. The center panel was donated to the EMU historic preservation program and may eventually be installed in McKenny Union, says Monahan.

Contact Geoff Larcom, glarcom@emich.edu , 734-487-4400