see us now" - if taken in reference to All Saints’ Church - suggests that Springhill has its "eyes wide shut" in respect to what could be that town's greatest architectural asset, a gorgeous Church with a towering steeple set on a hill in the middle of the town.

In 1993 the catalogue published for the William Harris exhibition that year included a reproduction of William Harris's exterior elevation drawing for All Saints' Church, Springhill (right), in the hope that it might inspire the sort of restoration that was carried out at St. Mary's Church, Indian River a few years earlier.

How shall we understand William Harris's

Church architecture? We‘must, of course, look at his churches in the context of the architecture of the time in which he lived. But the forms

they take, and the way he uses his Gothic architectural vocabulary, are determined by the liturgical function of the building and not just by style and contemporary taste.

In the few interpretations of his designs left by Harris the emphasis is always on how the form of the building serves its function. But it is evident from both his architectural drawings and occasional written references that aesthetics also played a role in the thinking that went into his designs. Thus in The Charlottetown Examiner of March 14, 1896 he noted in reference to his new St. Paul’s Church on Queen Square, “The wooden groined roof covering the chancel and nave, besides being beautiful, is acoustically a very valuable feature.”

St. Paul’s (below) is the first of his churches to have a groined, or rib-vaulted, ceiling throughout, and the first in which his adaptation of important elements of the French Gothic vocabulary - prompted by their acoustical utility - is complete. In addition to the groined ceiling, shallow transepts, an apsidal east end, a chancel the same width and height as the nave, sounding panels of thin spruce and maple boards in the chancel, and a chancel floor supported on a single sounding post of juniper wood, all contributed to an acoustical efficiency that made him extremely popular as an ecclesiastical architect. All these churches of his maturity — and eight of an original eleven survive in Nova Scotia as well as. seven of an original ten in Prince Edward Island - were designed as if they were musical instruments. In fact, Harris, who played the piano and the fiddle, spent hours at night studying the role played by these instruments in enhancing the sounds made in them, so much so that he kept his aged father awake, and grumbling, “If only he would play a tune I would forgive him!"

_ Not only do the interiors of these churches : enhance and distribute the sounds made within them by speakers and choirs, they also provide worshippers with excellent jj sight-lines. The first generation of Gothic ‘ Revival architects contented themselves with ‘ creating replicas of medieval buildings, often in the English Decorated Style. The High " Victorian architects like William Harris, who