CAMDEN - “We’re gonna need a bigger ladder,” one worker said, Friday morning, August 8, as a crew readied to raise a new steeple and place it atop the Chestnut Street Baptist Church. The action began at 5 a.m., when a Journey’s End truck pulling a 48-foot trailer bed left the Lyman-Morse boatyard in Thomaston, heading for Camden. The freight: A brand new fiberglass steeple to replace the old weather-worn one that had graced Camden’s downtown.

The steeple is also home to the town clock, which is also getting repaired and will be hoisted up to finish off the project. The town clock has been a missing mainstay in the community, as has been the steeple. The importance of the clock is such that residents for decades would mark their entrance and exit from work and school by the chiming of the bells.

The steeple overlooks the village green, and can be seen from Camden’s outer harbor by visitors on the water. According to the church in 2016, recent, significant foundation and framing work stabilized major safety issues, but the steeple still required extensive repairs. It embarked on a Save our Steeple campaign to raise the $538,000 needed to complete the work, and at the 2016 Town Meeting, asked voters to approve a $75,000 contribution in the town’s budget. 

Meanwhile, another crew, headed up by Taylor Martens, had been making repairs to the church, reinforcing the steeple casing with steel and carpentry work.

The new 7,000-pound steeple was crafted by a crew at Lyman-Morse, replicating the original in fiberglass. The Lyman-Morse crew that built the new steeple: Mike Nile, Jeremy Proctor, Jon Condon, Robert Harper, Steve Crane and Brian Harper.  

On June 1, the old wooden-shingled 10,000-pound steeple had been removed, in much similarity to the Sept. 8 — a crowd had gathered on Chestnut Street for hours to watch the action, crack jokes, and engage in plenty of conversation as the work crews went about securing lines and ensuring the project would go off without a hitch.

It did, and there was generous applause from onlookers, as the steeple was lifted at 10 a.m., quietly and gracefully to its new skyward station.

According to the church’s history: “The church's spire, a visible landmark ever pointing the way to God, was taken down in 1853, when many planks of wood rotted out and the structure was deemed unsafe. Unfortunately it was necessary to remove the beautiful spire again in 1887 for many of the same reasons. It was again replaced in 1980, when an aspiring Eagle Scout from Camden , Billy Young, determined to replace the spire to earn his Eagle Scout rank. The 34-foot tall spire was designed by architect Christopher Glass. It has held the town clock since 1868.”

Shrouded in scaffolding and mesh, the church has not been unlike a rocket on a pad at Kennedy Space Center since June. But now it is ready to reemerge from its cocoon, and grace the Camden Green once again.