A miter once worn by the Rt. Rev. Samuel Seabury, Bishop of Connecticut, has returned to the Episcopal Church in Connecticut after a five-week restoration.
Textile Conservation Workshop of South Salem, New York, restored the miter, which reportedly had been held for years by a college fraternity. Seabury bought the miter in 1786, two years after his consecration.
The Rev. Kenneth W. Cameron, a former diocesan archivist and a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, is credited with recovering the miter from the fraternity.
The miter sat in a custom wooden box, with a lock and glass door, from 1971 to 2014, “covered inexpertly with UV — very dark — film,” said Meg Smith, archivist of the Episcopal church in Connecticut. It was transferred to an acid-free manuscript box in 2014.
Although a donor had expressed interest in funding the restoration, Smith said, the bishops and canons decided that the Episcopal Church in Connecticut should pay for the project.
Adapted from a report by Pam Dawkins, Episcopal Church in Connecticut
Matthew Townsend is a Halifax-based freelance journalist and volunteer advocate for survivors of sexual misconduct in Anglican settings. He served as editor of the Anglican Journal from 2019 to 2021 and communications missioner for the Anglican Diocese of Quebec from 2019 to 2022. He and his wife recently entered catechism class in the Orthodox Church in America.
