Saved From the Brink: The Daubrenet Mortuary Chapel is rescued – for now.

Due, we like to think, to attention brought by the Shockoe Examiner, the imminent collapse of the Daubrenet Mortuary Chapel in Oakwood Cemetery has been delayed.  The Shockoe Examiner brought the building’s interesting history to light last April - visit the original post Here.

  

Richmond Department of Public Works, which oversees the maintenance of Oakwood, sent workmen to cut the rusty padlock and go into the chapel for the first time in decades to shore up the heavy slate roof.  The roof, with its wooden supports, was on the point of collapse, which would have taken the fragile exterior brick walls with it.

The loss of this building would mean the extinction of one of the more rare building types in Richmond and perhaps in Virginia: the mortuary chapel.  Mausoleums were not uncommon in nineteenth-century cemeteries, and small chapels can be found here and there, but a building that combines the two functions as this does is unusual.  Built by a devotedly Catholic family, the Daubrenets prayed in the little room with its altar and other religious furniture while below their feet in what was referred to as the “crypt,” other family members were buried.

A photograph taken in 2018 of the ruinous interior (once described as “completely enriched with symbols of the Catholic Church”) shows it was once neatly whitewashed, and a multi-tiered altar against the wall was probably designed for floral offerings and icons.  A ghost mark on the wall indicates where the floor joists and floor met the wall below bricked-up windows on each side of the chapel.  The collapsed floor has fallen into the crypt while an overturned bench hints at what may have been the furniture for mourners.

  

A photo inside the now-locked chapel shows the shoring the City put in place to hold up the roof, braced against the exterior walls.  Unfortunately, all of the interior woodwork that was still in the building has apparently been stomped flat and most of it hauled away, losing an important record of artifacts and how the chapel was originally constructed.  Unused bracing has just been left on the floor to rot.

  

The interior bracing is attached to a large piece of unpainted plywood on the exterior – a patch that is sure to deteriorate and then disappear entirely in the heat of Richmond summers and the damp of Richmond winters.  It does keep weather out of the interior of the chapel for now, and the newly padlocked door will presumably deter vandals.

  

The plywood patch and wooden shoring inside is at best a five-year fix.  After that this little building will once again be endangered as deterioration of the wooden roof under the slate will continue unabated.  Hopefully, some solution and some funding will be found to repair this unique structure so the legacy of the Daubrenet family will continue to add to the historic landscape of Richmond’s Oakwood Cemetery.  

- Selden Richardson.