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The Cadet Chapel
United States Military Academy


[image ALT: The cover of a book titled in Old English lettering 'The Cadet Chapel • United States Military Academy • West Point, New York', and featuring a drawing of the Chapel, a large and somewhat austere Gothic church with an abbreviated transept and a massive square tower over the crossing.]
		
[image ALT: The title page of a book. It reads, in Old English lettering, 'The Cadet Chapel • United States Military Academy'.]

Preface

7

The Cadet Chapel

9

The Chapel Architecture

13

The Chapel Exterior

15

The Chapel Interior

21

The Lower Level

25

The Chapel Embellishments

27

The Exterior Embellishments

27

The Interior Embellishments

33

St. Martin's Chapel

39

The Chapel Tower

41

The Stained Glass Windows

43

The Chapel Organ

53

Religion at West Point

58

The Cadet Prayer

63

Appendices

64

Chapel Statistics

64

Glossary

65

Location of Chapel Windows by Class

66

Cadet Chaplains, USMA

73

List of Illustrations

The Cadet Chapel West Front

Frontispiece

Stringcourse Figure, Minstrel

11

The Cadet Chapel from the South

12

The Galilee Porch and the Ecclesiastical Dungeon

14

Stringcourse Figure, Musician

16

Tower Figure, Drummer

17

Tower Figure, Man with Brush

18

Tower Figure, Kneeling Soldier

19

The East Entrance of the Chapel

20

The Pulpit

22

The Lectern

23

Crypt Door Panel

26

Stringcourse Figure, Knight with Sword

28

Stringcourse Figure, Torchbearer

29

The Cadet Chapel Interior

31

Chancel Adornments

32

Transept Corbel: St. Matthew

34

Transept Corbel: St. Mark

35

Transept Corbel: St. Luke

36

Transept Corbel: St. John

37

Crypt Frieze Figures

40

The Chapel Cornerstone

42

Class Windows Presented by the Class of 1952

46

Buttress Embellishments, Adam and Eve

52

Stringcourse Figure, Crusader with Battle Axe

55

Chancel Hymn Board Angels

57

The St. John Plaque

62

Sectional Diagram of the Chapel

70

Plan of the Chapel

71

The Sanctuary Window

72
[decorative delimiter]

Technical Details

Copyright

The booklet was first published in 1953, then revised in a 2nd edition in 1958, the one I transcribed.

In that edition, 1958 copyright is asserted by the Cadet Chapel Board, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York; with the further information that "This Booklet has been prepared for the Cadet Chapel Board by an Editorial Committee whose members were: Colonel Lawrence E. Schick, Colonel William J. Morton, Jr., and Major George S. Pappas." If the Board was an actual unit of the Military Academy and thus part of the U. S. Federal government — which is unclear, at least to me — no copyright claim should have been made; but at any rate the book is now in the public domain pursuant to the 1978 revision of the U. S. Copyright Code, since whatever copyright subsisted was not renewed at the appropriate time, which would have been in 1980‑1981 and/or 1985‑1986. (Details here on the copyright law involved.)

Proofreading

This transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was remarkably well proofread, but still included a very few typographical errors. I marked the corrections, when important (or unavoidable because inside a link), with a bullet like this;º and when trivial, with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles.

A small number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any mistakes not marked, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Typographical Note and Placement of Illustrations

The booklet is pleasantly designed and attractively typeset, on good paper with wide margins: it seemed somewhat ungracious not to acknowledge it onsite in some way, so those of you with any one of a number of black-letter fontsº will see the chapter and section headings in "Gothic" script more or less matching the printed edition.

The illustrations posed a problem. In the print edition, while some of the drawings accompany the text that refers to them, most do not, but are placed for esthetic effect at the foot of the pages where they form a stringcourse of their own: a particularly handsome arrangement which is undone by any normal Web transcription, in which pages run seamlessly. I've therefore had to redistribute the drawings: at the ends of chapters or sections keeping them in their original places, moving others to accompany related text, sometimes grouping them to retain something of the original feel. I haven't been completely success­ful. The page on which an illustration appears in the printed text is indicated by the image's URL.

The following photograph is an example; it is the frontispiece, fa­cing the title page:


[image ALT: A photograph of a large and somewhat austere Gothic church with an abbreviated transept and a massive square tower over the crossing; it is seen from the side, with a paved road curving up to it. It is the Cadet Chapel at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.]


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Site updated: 3 Aug 12

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