Faith Builds a Chapel: The Story of an Adventure in Craftsmanship

Faith Builds a Chapel: The Story of an Adventure in Craftsmanship by Winifred C. Boynton. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780961342906.

Dust Jacket This remarkable book, first published in 1953, is a stirring testimony to the human spirit. It tells the story of how Winifred and Donald Boynton, lacking any formal training in craftsmanship, conceived and built entirely by hand a 15th-century Norwegian Chapel on their summer estate, Bjorklunden Vid Sjon (Birch Forest by the Water), in Door County, Wisconsin. The chapel was handcrafted by the Boyntons during the nine summers from 1939 to 1947....The inspiration for the architecture of the chapel--which follows the Scandinavian forms of the earlier buildings at Bjorklunden--was a wood chapel (a Stavkirke) which she and her son Carl Vail saw beside a lake in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1932. Mrs. Boynton first thought of building the chapel in 1935 and persuaded her husband that they should undertake the project. Four years later, with no formal training in the crafts they chose to use in building the chapel, they began their work....