Blandford Church Museum & Cemetery

Blandford Church Museum is a rare American treasure. It is one of the few churches (now a museum) whose decorative stained-glass windows were completely designed and installed under the direction of Louis Comfort Tiffany of New York.

The Church’s fifteen exquisite windows were commissioned by the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Petersburg in memory of soldiers buried at the adjacent Blandford Cemetery. From 1901 to 1912, Tiffany and his team of artists designed, created, and installed the windows.

A guided tour of the Church Museum reveals its history as an 18th-century Anglican house of worship, its eventual abandonment and fall into disrepair, its use as a field hospital during the Siege of Petersburg, and its restoration.

Blandford Cemetery, one of the oldest and largest in America, is the resting place of veterans and many others who are part of the region’s history.  A tour includes monuments and tombs, and funerary art representing outstanding examples of eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century gravestones, sculptures, and decorative iron fences.

DID YOU KNOW?

America’s Memorial Day Holiday was inspired by events at Blandford Church Museum and Cemetery. Soon after the Civil War ended, Mary Logan, wife of Union Commander General John A. Logan, witnessed a group of schoolgirls placing flowers on the graves of soldiers. Deeply moved when she saw the ritual repeated the next year, she related the story to her husband, who took steps that ultimately led to the observance of Memorial Day as a national holiday.