“Do you think it’s open?” John said as we approached the double doors leading into Emmanuel Episcopal church, in Petoskey, Michigan.1 In our quest to locate and visit lesser known or overlooked Hemingway-related areas and items in Northern Michigan, we had nearly forgotten about the window.
Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Petoskey, Michigan
A small SUV was parked under the church's backside porte-cochère. Tentatively pulling on one of the door's handles, we found the entrance was indeed unlocked—a surprise as it was not Sunday. Stepping into the building, pipe organ music instantly enveloped us, as if the sound of the distance instrument were bleeding out from the walls.
“That's probably the minister of music practicing for Sunday service,” Sharon said.
Roaming around for a moment to get our bearings, we eventually peered around a corner into the sanctuary where we saw a man seated at the organ. He was clearly surprised to have two unexpected visitors wander in, but was absolutely pleasant about the interruption.
“Sorry to bother you but the door was open," John said.
The man seemed a bit concerned about this.
"We’re looking for the Hemingway stained-glass window,” Sharon quickly added. “It's the one Sunny had placed to honor her brother Ernest.”
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The dedication plaque underneath the window
"Oh! Well, I believe it's over that way," said the man with a gesture toward a part of the church located behind us and to the side.
“Is it okay if we take a look?” John asked.
"Go right ahead,” the man said and went back to his music, giving us not another thought.
Turning on our heels and exiting the sanctuary, we made our way into a short hallway located beside the main sanctuary. It was filled with the glow of rainbow light coming from a bank of colored windows and seemed the likely place to find what we sought.
Madelaine "Sunny" Hemingway was only five years younger than Ernest. While growing up, they were so close that they shared a secret language that only they could understand. In the documentary Ernest Hemingway: Life in Michigan, Sunny’s son, also named Ernest, explains that the two of them had a special relationship with one another unlike what they experienced with any other sibling. He observes laughingly that his mother was a self-confessed tomboy who loved accompanying her brother on adventures, camping together and even ganging up on their other siblings together.2
When Hemingway died, Sunny had an uncanny experience inside an Episcopal church in Ketchum, Idaho, where she had been drawn to enter and pray for her brother before his Catholic burial service. In her memoir about her life with “Ernie,” as she called him, she speaks about how when she entered the empty church the morning of her brother’s funeral, she saw beautiful light streaming through the stained glass window behind the altar. She had knelt down in the light and had whispered the entire burial service from her prayer book. Before she got up, she looked down at the carpet and saw her brother’s face there, looking at her with sad eyes. The vision was so vivid that she went out and grabbed her sister Ursula and brought her to the church to see if she too could see Ernest’s face. When they returned together, though, the face was gone, and neither of them could see anything unusual.
Sunny recounted how she was afraid to tell anyone else about her experience because they might think that she had gone mad, but she ended up confessing her experience to her minister, Father Dudley Burr, when she returned to Petoskey, where she and her family spent their summers at the Hemingway family’s Walloon Lake cottage. Father Burr reassured her that such encounters after the death of a loved one were not uncommon. And her experience in Ketchum of sitting in that quiet church and feeling a strong sense of personal communion with her brother may have been one of the reasons why she decided it would be appropriate to commemorate his memory through a tribute window made of stained glass.
Examining each window along the narrow corridor, it did not take us long to find what we were seeking—a beautiful depiction of the nativity with "In memory of Ernest Miller Hemingway" in a legend across the bottom. It was lucky for us the minister of music had been in that day. Our original plan of simply wandering around outside the church to find the window would have utterly failed, for from the outside this magnificent scene looked (as did all the other windows) grey and formless.
View of the Hemingway Window (far right) as seen from outside
Sunny does not explain in her memoir why she picked a nativity scene for Ernest, nor the reason for the peculiar detail that most stood out to us: a white unicorn near the base of the window. What was not mysterious, though, was the obvious love that prompted this tribute, and the appropriateness of the fact that in Michigan there should exist this beautiful homage to Ernest’s life and legacy in a part of the world in which he spent his childhood summers, and that he always treasured.
The Ernest Hemingway Window
Works Cited
Ernest Hemingway: Life in Michigan. WCMU Public Television, 2007.
Hemingway, Madelaine Miller. Ernie: Hemingway’s Sister Sunny Remembers (Holt, Michigan: Thunder Bay Press, 1975 [1999]).
Photos by John Hargrove and Sharon Hamilton
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1 Located at 1020 E. Mitchell St., the current Emmanuel Episcopal Church is not the same building in which Rev W.J. Datson (who, although not affiliated with the Methodist-Evangelical Church in Horton Bay, had officiated Ernest and Hadley's marriage in Horton Bay, MI) had ministered. Petoskey's old Emmanuel Episcopal Church was located on Waukazoo Ave near the corner of E. Mitchell.
2 Ernest Hemingway: Life in Michigan. WCMU Public Television, 2007.
John Hargrove is a Michigan-based writer and Hemingway researcher; he is also the founder of "Ernest Hemingway: The True Gen," an online community of Hemingway researchers and aficionados hosted on social media. He has blogged previously for the Hemingway Society on Hemingway's 1916 newspaper article and the infamous "socket photo," among other topics.
Sharon Hamilton is a member of the Hemingway Society Board. She has blogged previously for the Hemingway Society about Hemingway and Hadley’s Chicago Apartment, Hemingway’s New Orleans, the baseball ticket stub the author took with him to the front in World War I, and the birth of his first son. In October 2023, she presented a webinar on "Hemingway in Toronto" to members of the Hemingway Society.
Hargove and Hamilton have co-authored blog posts on Hemingway's Pamplona Legacy and their adventures tracing Hemingway in Buffalo, Wyoming.