If you have walked or driven past a handful of Galveston's oldest churches this year, you have probably seen plywood where stained glass should be. Not boarded-up abandonment, just gaps, patched over, at buildings that are otherwise very much in use. It is easy to assume the worst: storm damage, vandalism, a congregation running out of money to fix what broke. On Ball Street this week, the answer turned out to be the opposite. The plywood at Trinity Episcopal Church came down, and for the first time in nearly a year, sunlight is moving through the church's full set of historic windows again.
That reveal is worth pausing on, because it is not really one story. It is the latest chapter in a pattern that has been playing out, congregation by congregation, across downtown Galveston for years, each on its own timeline, funded from its own source, with no single deadline tying any of them together.
What Went Back In This Week
Trinity's windows are old even by Galveston standards. The oldest dates to 1883, predating most of the buildings around it. The church itself was completed in 1857, one of only two churches on the island that old, and it has been raised on jacks, stripped of its south wall by the 1900 storm, and rebuilt with new tie-rods and a new copper roof after Hurricane Alicia. The windows survived all of that. What they could not survive was a century of grime and settling lead, which is why they spent the better part of a year not in Galveston at all, but at Willet Studios in Minnesota, where conservators cleaned each pane by hand and repaired the frames before shipping everything back.
Workers spent this past week putting it all back together. Felipe Medina, Gabriel Rodriguez, and Silas Bower carried and lifted sections of glass into place on Wednesday, August 12, reinstalling one window at a time into frames that had sat empty behind plywood since the project began. The church's rector, the Rev. Jimmy Abbott, called the completion a blessing. One of his favorites, a window depicting angels and the three Marys at the empty tomb on Easter morning, is back in place along with a window showing the Christ child held by Mary. Twenty stained glass windows in total make up the sanctuary, including two Tiffany Studio pieces, and all twenty are now visible again for the first time since the project started.
If you want to see them yourself, Trinity opens its doors for free public tours Tuesdays at 2 p.m., entering through the church office at 2216 Ball Street, and again Sundays at 11:30 a.m. The church is still raising money for ongoing preservation work under its Light for the Ages campaign, a detail worth knowing if you are the kind of resident who likes putting money toward the buildings that make a place feel like itself.
Every Restoration Runs on Its Own Clock
Trinity's project is not an outlier. It is one entry in a longer list, and the list makes the real pattern visible: there is no citywide effort coordinating any of this. Each building's restoration depends on whoever funds it, and that funding looks different every time.
Reedy Chapel, the oldest AME congregation in Texas at 2013 Broadway, has its own version of the plywood story. Church trustee Sharon Batiste Gillins has had to reassure passersby more than once that the gaps in Reedy Chapel's sanctuary windows are not damage or theft.
"Don't be alarmed by the fact that three of the stained-glass windows in Reedy Chapel's historic sanctuary aren't there," Gillins said. "With gratitude, we report that Reedy Chapel received a generous grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to restore them."
That grant traces back to 2023, when Reedy Chapel was one of 35 historic Black churches nationwide selected from roughly 1,200 applicants for a share of a $4 million preservation fund, with $100,000 designated for the congregation's exterior masonry, stucco, and stained glass. The building itself dates to 1886 and 1887, rebuilt after the original structure burned in the 1885 fire that swept much of the city, and it holds a particular weight in island history: it is the site where General Order No. 3 was read in 1865, the announcement now marked nationally as Juneteenth.
A few blocks away, First Presbyterian Church at 1903 Church Street has been working through its own multi-year sanctuary restoration, guided by David P. Salyer, who also led the church's repairs after Hurricane Ike. His project has focused less on the glass itself and more on what had been covering it: decades of yellowing protective glazing that dulled the windows' color long before anyone thought to remove it. Once that layer came off, the original richness of the glass reappeared, no cleaning or re-leading required, just the removal of a fix installed generations ago that had quietly outlived its usefulness.
And at Congregation B'nai Israel on Avenue O, the oldest Reform synagogue in Texas, a window donated in memory of Harris and Eliza Kempner still catches the light the way it has for decades. Rabbi Peter Kessler has pointed to it as a marker of the congregation's own long history on the island, visible only from inside the building but no less a part of downtown's accumulated inheritance of glass.
Where to Look
| Building | Address | What's happening |
|---|---|---|
| Trinity Episcopal Church | 2216 Ball St | Full window set reinstalled Aug. 12, 2026, after cleaning and repair at Willet Studios in Minnesota |
| Reedy Chapel AME Church | 2013 Broadway | Stained glass and masonry restoration funded by a 2023 National Trust preservation grant |
| First Presbyterian Church | 1903 Church St | Decades of yellowed protective glazing removed during a multi-year sanctuary restoration |
| Congregation B'nai Israel | 3008 Ave. O | Historic windows on view, including one honoring Harris and Eliza Kempner |
Why This Isn't One Story, It's Four
The instinct when you see this much restoration happening around the same few blocks is to look for a single explanation, a grant program or a preservation office pushing it all forward at once. There isn't one. Trinity's money came from its own congregation through a capital campaign. Reedy Chapel's came from a national fund built specifically to support historic Black churches. First Presbyterian's work grew out of storm repair that started with Ike and never really stopped. Each building is on a clock set by its own fundraising, its own conservators, its own board.
That is worth knowing if you live near any of these buildings, because it means the plywood you see this year is not a sign anything is wrong. It is a sign someone spent years getting the money together, and now the work is finally visible from the sidewalk. Trinity's project alone took roughly a year just for the glass to travel to Minnesota and back. Multiply that by four congregations working independently, and what looks like a coincidence of timing is really just four separate, unrelated efforts landing in the same stretch of downtown in the same year.
If you have lived on the island long enough to remember when the plywood first went up, this week is the payoff. Walk down Ball Street on a Tuesday afternoon and you can see it for yourself: the light is back where it belongs, at least at one of downtown's oldest addresses. The others are still working on it, on their own schedules, in their own way.
For more on the history and character of the neighborhoods around downtown Galveston, including the East End Historical District just blocks from these churches, Spagnola Realty Group keeps a running guide to the island's historic pockets. If you are curious about what it actually takes to own and maintain a piece of Galveston's built history, from window repair to storm prep, reach out and schedule a consultation. We know these buildings and the neighborhoods around them from the inside.
