by Tim Gilmore
The waves envelope the young surfer in blues and greens, flecked and interspersed with gold, the rising sunlight, on that eastern side of St. George’s Episcopal Church on Fort George Island. The boy stands poised, as long as the window holds, on his golden surfboard. The stained-glass window, dedicated in 2004, two years after the death of 14-year-old Cameron Merrill Gallion from cancer, is not the church’s most noticeable window.
The multicolored stained image of St. George slaying the dragon looks out from behind the altar across the length of the church. To see Cameron’s window, you have to come into the chancel, the front part of the church set aside for clergy. You have to kneel there to take in the image of Cameron on his surfboard.
The steeply pitched roofs of Carpenter Gothic churches alongside Northeast Florida’s waterways make these wooden sanctuaries, with their intricate scissor trusses exposed in the ceilings, feel like ships carrying their congregations through the troubled waters of the world. “Sermons in stone,” says congregant Hope McCharen. “That’s what they called the gothic churches in Europe on which these American versions were based. The structure preaches the sermon.”
It’s an intimate space, narrow and tall. Thin stained glass lancet windows all point upward. Narrow pine bead boards of the ceiling are colored sky-blue over tall white interiors. The whole church points heavenward. The island church, nearly 150 years old, seats only about 80 people. It imitates ascension.
“We can’t stay mad at each other for long,” jokes the legendary “Cracker food” chef Art Janette, “because we sit so close together.” Art’s been coming to St. George’s for 30 years. When Janette still cooked at The Palms, the fish camp on Clapboard Creek with which his cooking was long synonymous, a customer invited him to St. George’s. He’s been coming ever since.
Services started in the dining hall or parlor of the Fort George Hotel, a magnificent wooden structure soon to burn, but by 1881, Episcopalians on the island worshiped in the yet-unfinished new sanctuary. John Freeman Young, second bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Florida, seeded several “historic river missions,” having divided Northeast Florida into regions according to its waterways. Now two wealthy women divided the bishop over which plot of land the church should occupy, and which woman could donate more funds.
Young commissioned Fernandina Beach architect Robert Schuyler, who’d already built Carpenter Gothic churches on North Florida waters and in 1887 would build St. Paul’s-by-the-Sea at Jacksonville Beach and the towering brick Gothic church, Old St. Andrew’s, less than a mile from the grand St. John’s Cathedral, the seat of the diocese in the middle of Jacksonville.
Above these stories tones the iron in its bell-cote perched like a widow’s walk up over the roof’s peak. Fort George Island residents picked St. George as their namesake saint—the mythical medieval warrior who slays a dragon that’s extorted from villagers first a tribute of livestock and then human lives.
Art Janette first met Susan and Flip Gallion at The Palms, where they loved his fried green tomatoes, made with his mother’s recipe, his Little Marsh Island Casserole, his scallops and blackened shrimp straight from the iron skillet. They lived near the ocean on Amelia Island, having moved down from Atlanta, following their young son who felt called to the sea. Janette invited them to St. George’s and over Cameron the congregation came together.
Susan and Flip never told their son, though they suspected he knew, that doctors said he had no chance of survival. He lived with his cancer for 15 months, a tenth of his whole life, his last eight months at sea.
McCharen points to another memorial window, made for Hannah Rollins, who lived with her husband John out here on this island, and whose family, from 1868 to 1923, owned Zephaniah Kingsley’s old slave plantation house. It was the Rollinses who, in 1875, first invited Bishop Young to hold services on the island.
Young and his successor, Bishop Edwin Weed, found themselves pulled between church benefactors Hannah Rollins and Ellen Ward. When Schuyler built the church where Ward envisioned it, Rollins refused, for the rest of her life, to step foot inside. When the bishops came to the island, Hannah Rollins insisted that after they visit the church, they visit her at home, to hold separation communion services and prayers. After Hannah’s death in 1906, her daughter Gertrude donated the memorial window. As Jonathan Rich put it in his 2023 book Spires in the Sun: The Carpenter Gothic Episcopal Churches of Florida, the window “gave [Hannah’s] spirit a permanent home in the building she once refused to enter.”
Art Janette points out Cameron’s surfboard in the window. “That’s a Rozo,” he says. Cameron wanted a Rozo board, even as he became weaker. So skinny, he could barely stand up on the board, he surfed it before he died. Rozos take their name from Dickie “Rozo” Rosborough, who gained fame surfing in Hawaii, where he lived in a Quonset hut, in the 1970s and ’80s. A Jax native, Rozo, now in his 70s, lives nearby on the North Florida Keys on Heckscher Drive, where he shapes his own boards. Art calls it “a kind of island mysticism that brought Cameron and his family here.”
When I first arrive at St. George’s Episcopal Church and Art Janette asks me if I’ve met St. George, I wonder for a moment if the mythical dragonslayer resides on the island. Then he tells me he’s asking about St. George the Peacock. I doubt Hannah Rollins would approve. I doubt also she’d approve of her memorial window. But if such windows bring spirits into the church, and if the Carpenter Gothic structure braves the seas of the tribulations of the faithful, then surely this vessel knows most what this mythical island needs and can serve, even more than as a galleon, for the independent spirit, as a most rightly shaped surfboard.
