Murlin's Gothic Lanterns: Restoring a Pair of 1927 Brass Sconces

These two lanterns came to me through Facebook Marketplace, for $250, with a story attached: they had hung on a church in Hamtramck that was torn down in the 1970s. I have not been able to confirm which church. They arrived dull and corroded, with most of the ornament gone from their crowns, and the patent numbers cast into the metal told me exactly what they were.

A small Gothic building on a bracket

Each lantern is a miniature of the architecture it was made to serve. The body is a six-sided cage of pierced tracery, the stonework that fills a Gothic window, with a fleur-de-lis at the top and bottom of each panel, paired C-scrolls, and a cusped diamond at the center, all framed by twisted-rope moldings. Six tall blades rise from the corners of the crown like the pinnacles of a tower, and between them stood pierced fleur-de-lis crestings, the ornament that runs along the ridge of a Gothic roof. A six-sided cap ends in a long spiral finial.

The arm is a heavy ogee, the double S-curve that English Gothic builders used for arches from the late thirteenth century, and it carries a rosette and a running band of trefoils, tulips and berries. The trefoil, a three-lobed leaf form, and the fleur-de-lis both carried meaning in medieval church art: the lily was linked to the Virgin Mary, and its three petals were read as the Trinity.

The Murlin Manufacturing Company

The arm and the wall plate are marked DES. PAT. 73934 and DES. PAT. 73933. Those are United States design patents granted on November 22, 1927, to Donald E. Lindsay of Springfield, Pennsylvania, who assigned them to the Murlin Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia. Lindsay filed a whole family of designs that August: lanterns, an arm, bracket backs and brackets, numbered D73,930 through D73,937. The lantern body matches D73,930, the wall plate is D73,933, and the arm is D73,934.

Murlin issued its first catalogue in February 1921, and in 1922 it took a permit for a one-story brick factory on Paschall Avenue, its address for the next quarter century. Its ads in the Philadelphia builders' trade press promised that "Murlin Cast Fixtures of iron or bronze will last the life of your building" and offered "Distinctive features for homes, apartments, hotels, churches, factories." A 1929 ad shows one of its lanterns on the Philadelphia General Hospital, and in 1938 the firm told the readers of Church Management that it had done "hundreds of efficient economical Church Lighting jobs." Lindsay stayed with the company and was its president by 1949, with patents in his name running to 1958.

The company changed with the times. By the 1940s it was making lighting for ships, by 1953 it had moved to Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and it later became a division of Harvard Industries that made shelving. The Murlin name survived in corporate listings into the 1990s.

The Gothic Revival

The style these lanterns speak was already two centuries old when they were cast. Horace Walpole began his Gothic house, Strawberry Hill, outside London in 1749. In the 1830s and 1840s A. W. N. Pugin championed Gothic as the true Christian architecture, and he designed the decoration and interiors of the new Houses of Parliament. In America, Trinity Church on the green in New Haven, finished in 1814, is counted as the first Gothic church; Richard Upjohn's Trinity Church on Wall Street followed in 1846, and James Renwick's St. Patrick's Cathedral was dedicated in 1879.

A second American wave ran from about 1890 into the Depression. Colleges built in "Collegiate Gothic," and Ralph Adams Cram, a leading architect of the movement, served as supervising architect at Princeton from 1907 to 1929. Even skyscrapers wore tracery: the Woolworth Building of 1913 was nicknamed the "Cathedral of Commerce," and Chicago's Tribune Tower was finished in Gothic dress in 1925. Cram built for Detroit too, designing the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, and in Hamtramck he designed St. Florian, dedicated in 1928 with a spire nearly 200 feet tall, the year after these lanterns were patented.

Modernism ended the run, with steel, glass and function in place of historical ornament.

Hamtramck's lost churches

In 1981 Detroit razed Poletown, the neighborhood along its border with Hamtramck, to clear land for the General Motors plant that opened in 1985 as the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center. According to the Detroit Historical Society, the 465-acre site held 1,500 homes, 144 businesses and 16 churches. Among them was Immaculate Conception, whose parishioners fought the demolition and lost. The church these lanterns came from fell earlier, by the story I was told, so it was probably not one of them.

Bringing them back

The patent drawing was the most useful document I had, because it shows the crown complete, with a fleur-de-lis cresting between every pair of blades. A surviving original turned out not to be a flat cutout: its front is domed, its edges rounded, and its leaf rises out of the plate like a spearhead. I generated a 3D model of it with Meshy.ai, printed the missing crestings in PETG on a Bambu Lab P1S, and painted them to blend with the old metal. They are the only new parts on the lanterns, and they come off without harming the 1927 castings. Federal preservation standards ask that a missing feature be rebuilt only on documentary or physical evidence and match the original, and the patent drawing and the surviving cresting supplied both.

The lanterns had no glass, so I set amber glass behind the tracery: Youghiogheny U-57-912, made in the style of the old Uroboros glass, whose maker closed in 2016 or 2017. Lit, the whole cage glows. Both lanterns are fully rewired with brass lamp pipe through the hollow stem, damp-rated porcelain sockets and high-heat wire, and they are held together with slotted silicon bronze screws, which suit the period and sit closer to the castings' metal than the zinc-plated steel screw that had seized in one wall plate.

My friend Alan Kaniarz, who introduced me to restoring old lights and taught me how it is done, helped me mount them on brick.

What it cost

Prices include shipping and tax as paid.

I used Claude Code to trace the patents and the company's history, track down parts and help me write this up.