by Anthony Silva

An old yellowed clipping from the Boston Globe reveals that "the streets of Boston in 1700 led to the homes, workrooms and shops of more than a dozen silversmiths all making silver of importance." One of them was john Coney, who became the teacher of a well-known American who was 47 years younger than he, whose name was Paul Revere.

It was about the time that Coney and Revere's father, Apollo Rivoire, were working together that a delegation from a recently founded church in Marblehead came in to place an order.

The two tankards which were ordered were not ordinary. They featured molded lips and bases, a delicate ring moulding, domed covers, scrolled thumb pieces and cast cherubs' faces on the handle ends. They were inscribed: A Gift to Mister Holyoke's Church, Marblehead; 1716." Through the years, other tankards, six beakers, a pair of flagons, two alms dishes and a spoon were purchased for the church as gifts.

The gifts came from many members of the church including merchant Edward Brattle, who was the brother of Reverend William Brattle of Cambridge. Ebenezer Stacey, who was on a committee to oppose a proposed tax on "spirituous liquors and wines" and John Legg, who was one of only 114 homeowners in Marblehead at the time. He purchased a baptismal basin, which was the largest ever made by an American silversmith and considered the grandest piece ever crafted by John Coney.

When our church burned to the ground in 1910, the silver was miraculously undamaged because it was on display at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. It was a harbinger of what lay ahead 80 years in the future.

For most of the 20th century, our silver rested in a velvet line wooden box in the basement of Marblehead's National Grand Bank, unused and neglected.

In the fall of 1982, the Board of Trustees began to discuss the possibility of turning our silver collection into a usable asset. A congregational meeting was planned a year later to propose putting the silver up for auction.

Then our silver's second miracle occurred. Only weeks before the scheduled vote, church member Gordie Corzine was assigned a seat next to Jonathan Fairbanks during a business flight to Cincinnati. Corzine struck up a conversation and history was changed, for Mr. Fairbanks was the curator of American decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The auction never took place. Instead, within 10 months of that chance meeting, the museum notified the church that an anonymous donor wanted to purchase the collection for $325,000 and donate it to the M.F.A.

On a 69 to 2 vote, the church membership decided to sell the silver and establish a trust, whose interest would be divided equally between reinvestment in the Trust and additional income to the General Fund.

Today, under a glass dome, the gleaming collection can be seen with this inscription: "This Marblehead collection represents the most significant acquisition of ecclesiastical silver to come to the Museum since the great gift by the BrattIe Street Church in 1913."

The story is now part of our heritage. It also Illuminates a truth: many people, centuries ago, gave of themselves to improve our church community; their gifts still empower us today.