[The Star-Ledger] The basement of the Grace Church in Newark is catacomb-like, with a narrow stone tunnel that runs almost a city block long. There are a few musty rooms down there, and much of the Anglican Catholic parish's history is stacked among discarded furniture, old hymnals and dismantled organ keyboards and pipes.
As years turned into decades and decades turned into a century, the piles grew.
Some of the most important stuff – the original church registry from 1848, for example – is kept safe in the office of Brent J. Bates, the rector since 2011.
But one very important piece of church history is missing, and Bates believes it is there, somewhere, because, well, everything else is.
Bates and the church's new music director, James Hopkins, are making a concerted effort to find the 124-year-old original sheet music to a composition called "Materna," written by church organist Samuel Augustus Ward, who died in 1903.
Ward wrote the music to accompany the words of "O Mother Dear, Jerusalem," an ancient hymn with Latin roots.
But somewhere along the line -- no one knows exactly why or how -- someone decided to marry Ward's "Materna" to Katherine Lee Bates' 1895 poem "America" to give birth to "America the Beautiful."
