150-year-old Cape Breton church to be demolished after Fiona damage

For more than 150 years, St. Bartholomew's Anglican Church in Louisbourg, N.S., was able to withstand everything the weather threw at it.

However, in its long history, it never saw anything quite like post-tropical storm Fiona.

“It just tore through it with such energy and force that it weakened the whole structure of the building," said Peter Rafuse, the church’s minister.

Fiona's winds are believed to have blown into the old church by coming straight through an upper window.

Inside, the shattered glass is still on the floor a year and a half later.

Pews are scattered everywhere.

However, the real damage is what can't be seen — engineer examinations have discovered cracks in the building's beams that would be too expensive to fix.

"We've had quotes of over $2 million,” Rafuse said.

“I’m heartbroken. This church has been my life,” added Jon Lawrence, who said he had been attending the church since he was a baby.

With an aging congregation that is now down to fewer than 20 regular members, the faithful have come to accept that their church will soon be no more.

“This is the end of the line,” Lawrence said. “It will be taken apart, and the parts will go somewhere else.”

Given some of these people have never gone to church anywhere else, naturally they're upset about it.

“I should be,” said longtime church member Donald Eisan. “(I was) married in it. All my three kids were baptized in it.”

Recently, St. Matthew Wesley United Church in North Sydney, N.S., was torn down with the intention of its bricks and mortar being repurposed. The people at St. Bartholomew's say they have enough money through insurance — roughly $600,000 — to do the same.

“So it’s even possible that parts of this building, or the entire building, could wind up in Hawaii somewhere, or goodness knows where,” Rafuse said.

While this 19th-century place of worship may have met its end at the hands of Fiona, the church managed to be part of one last piece of local history.

“We were told there was a gust of wind in Louisbourg that day that was recorded at 196 kilometres an hour,” Lawrence said. “That church has stood a lot of storms, but that’s a strong wind.”

The group said it has contacted a company from Truro, N.S., that it expects will perform the demolition work.

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