Rev. Alfred Rives Shands, III, papers, 1832-2021
Held by The Filson Historical Society
Creator: Shands, Rev. Alfred Rives, III, 1928-2021
Title: Rev. Alfred Rives Shands, III, papers, 1832-2021
Rights: For information regarding literary and copyright interest for these papers, contact the Collections Department.
Size of Collection: 4.5 cubic feet and 2 ovsz. folders
Location Number: Mss. A S528a
Biographical Note
Al Shands
Rev. Alfred Rives Shands, III (1928-2021), known most often as “Al,” was an Episcopal priest, film producer, author, art collector, and philanthropist who lived in Louisville, Kentucky.
Al was born in Washington, D.C., to Dr. Alfred Rives Shands, Jr. (1899-1981) and Elizabeth Sheffer Prewitt Shands, sometimes called “Polly” (1898-1993), whose family was from Winchester, Kentucky. In 1926, Dr. Shands and Elizabeth met and married in Baltimore, Maryland, where both were working at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, he as an orthopedic surgeon and she as a graduate nurse. The couple moved to Durham, North Carolina, where Dr. Shands worked as an associate professor of surgery at Duke University School of Medicine and where Al lived for the first years of his life. The family later moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where Dr. Shands became the first director of the Alfred I. Du Pont Institute on the Nemours estate, which specialized in treating children with disabilities. He served as director from 1940 until his retirement in 1969, except for a four-year period when he served as a colonel and chief orthopedic consultant for the Air Force. Al grew up in the family’s house on the Nemours estate, now called the “Shands House.”
In 1946, Al graduated from Woodberry Forest School in Virginia. He received a BA in English literature from Princeton and a master’s in divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary, where he was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1955. Throughout his life, Al preached at churches in Washington D.C., Michigan, and Louisville. In 1967, he met and married Mary Norton Ballard in Washington, D.C. They moved to Mary’s hometown of Louisville in 1970 and remained active in the Louisville cultural and philanthropic communities until their deaths.
In 1969, Al started Alfred Shands Productions, Inc., a documentary production company. Until 1983 he produced approximately 35 films, one of which, “Whose Child is This?”, earned him a Peabody award. He published two books: The Liturgical Movement and the Local Church (1958), Border Crossings (2000), and Rounding the Circle (2013); he was also one of the creators of the revised Book of Common Prayer (1979), now universally used in the Episcopal Church. In 1982, Al founded St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, also known as “House Church,” which met in congregants’ homes as a mission of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky. At the same time, he was the vicar of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Harbor Springs, Michigan, where he and Mary had a summer home.
Al and Mary made substantial contributions to cultural and charitable institutions throughout their lives. Al was a board member of the Speed Art Museum, sat on the advisory board of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, was a member of New York’s Whitney National Committee, and sat on the Museum of Modern Art’s International Council. He and Mary were serious art collectors. Their home, known as “Great Meadows,” was specially designed by Mary’s cousin, architect David Morton, to house their art collection. In 2010, Al received the Kentucky Governor Awards in the Arts Milner Award for outstanding philanthropic contributions to the arts. He left his art collection to the Speed Art Museum upon his death. He also left behind the Great Meadows Foundation, a grant-giving foundation that supports artists.
Mary Shands
Mary Ballard Norton Shands (1930-2009) was born in Louisville to Jane Lewis Morton (1908-1988), an acclaimed painter and philanthropist, and George Washington Norton, III (1902-1964), who founded the radio franchise WAVE in Louisville. In 1964, after Mary’s father and brother, George IV, died in the same year in separate car accidents, she and her mother took over the running of WAVE. It operated under the name Orion Broadcasting and had stations in cities other than Louisville as well; the franchise was sold in the late 1980s. Mary Shands had three children by her first marriage to Woodford H. Dulaney: Jane, Robin, and Margaret. She met and married Al Shands after her divorce from Dulaney.
Mary created Foxhollow, a health and wellness spa, which her daughter and granddaughter later converted into Foxhollow Farm. She also helped establish what is now the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts (KMAC).
Scope and Content Note
A collection of papers related to the life, work, and family of Alfred Shands, III (1928-2021), an Episcopal priest, film producer, author, art collector, and philanthropist who lived in Louisville.
Folders 1-19 contain correspondence. The collection includes some early correspondence by various members of Shands’s family, especially his mother’s side, the Prewitt family. Nineteenth and early 20th-century correspondents include Collin Prewitt, Hickman Prewitt, Julia H. Prewitt, David Prewitt, and others (folders 1-2). Other correspondence includes letters written to or from Al’s mother Elizabeth “Polly” Sheffer Prewitt Shands, his father Dr. Alfred R. Shands, Jr., his cousin Martha Breckinridge, and family friend Jessica Ball Du Pont, with whom Al regularly corresponded. Most of the correspondence from the 1940s to 1990s is to or from Al while he was studying at Princeton and the Episcopal Theological Seminary, and later while he was starting out as a minister. Correspondence from the early 2000s on includes letters written to or from Al and Mary or just Mary, much of them concerning art collecting, Great Meadows, or Foxhollow.
Folders 20-105 contain Shands’s writings. These include sermons he delivered at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in Louisville, St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel in Washington, D.C., St. Francis in the Fields in Harrods Creek, St. John’s Episcopal Church in Harbor Springs, Michigan, and others (folders 20-61). There are also copies of eulogies, wedding homilies, ordination homilies, documentary scripts, lectures, articles, book reviews, speeches, and book manuscripts (folders 62-105). Most of these writings concern matters of theology and religion, but others are about Shands’s interest in history or art collecting.
Folders 106-123 contain material concerning Shands’s professional and philanthropic pursuits. These include awards and honors he received, his participation in cultural institutions, his art collection, the establishment of Great Meadows, and details about his charitable contributions.
Folders 124-136 contain personal material about Shands as well as material from his childhood, including schoolwork and early writings and drawings. Folders 134-136 include newspaper clippings and magazine articles profiling Shands and Mary.
Folders 137-164 contain material related to Shands’s family. These include his wife Mary Norton Shands (folders 137-138), his mother Elizabeth “Polly” Sheffer Prewitt Shands (folders 139-145), his father Dr. Alfred Shands, Jr. (folders 146-151), his grandfather Aurelius R. Shands (folder 152), his mother-in-law Jane Morton Norton (folder 153), his mother’s cousin Elizabeth Prewitt Taylor (folder 154), and Jessie Ball Du Pont, a friend of the family (folder 155).
Oversized folder 165 contains awards and honors for Dr. Alfred Shands, Jr. Oversized folder 166 contains a diploma for Shands from Woodberry Forest School in Virginia, a 1967 issue of The Cathedral Age, in which Al published an article, a family tree workbook containing genealogical information about the Prewitts and other families, and a document dated 1854 titled “Fayette County, Kentucky, Herd Book containing the pedigrees of stock belonging to J. H. Sheffer.”
Relates to Alfred R. Shands, Jr. Photo Collection [023PC3]
Folder List
Box 1
Correspondence
Folder 1: Correspondence, 1857-1908 and undated
Folder 2: Correspondence, 1920-1929
Folder 3: Correspondence, 1930-1938
Folder 4: Correspondence, 1941-1950
Folder 5: Correspondence, 1951-1955
Folder 6: Correspondence, 1957-1969
Folder 7: Correspondence, 1981-1998
Folder 8: Correspondence, 2000-2002
Folder 9: Correspondence, 2003
Folder 10: Correspondence, 2004-2005
Folder 11: Correspondence, 2006
Folder 12: Correspondence, 2007
Folder 13: Correspondence, 2009
Folder 14: Correspondence, 2010-2013
Folder 15: Correspondence, 2015-2018
Folder 16: Correspondence, 2019
Folder 17: Correspondence, 2020-2021
Folder 18: Correspondence, undated
Folder 19: Correspondence and other material concerning world travel, 1986-2019
Writings
Folder 20: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 1977-1983
Folder 21: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 1984-1989
Folder 22: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, ca. 1980-1989
Folder 23: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 1990-1991
Folder 24: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 1992-1993
Folder 25: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 1994-1995
Folder 26: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 1996-1997
Folder 27: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 1999
Folder 28: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 2000-2001
Folder 29: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 2002-2003
Folder 30: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 2004-2005
Folder 31: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 2006-2007
Folder 32: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 2008
Folder 33: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 2009
Folder 34: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 2010
Folder 35: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 2011
Folder 36: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church newsletters/sermons, 2012-2015 and undated
Box 2
Writings, continued
Folder 37: St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel (Washington, D.C.) newsletters/sermons, 1963-1989
Folder 38: St. Francis in the Fields (Harrods Creek, Ky.) newsletters/sermons, 1982 and undated
Folder 39: Sermons, 1959-1984
Folder 40: Sermons, 1985-1986
Folder 41: Sermons, 1987
Folder 42: Sermons, 1988-1990
Folder 43: Sermons, 1991
Folder 44: Sermons, 1992
Folder 45: Sermons, 1993
Folder 46: Sermons, 1994
Folder 47: Sermons, 1995
Folder 48: Sermons, 1996
Folder 49: Sermons, 1997
Folder 50: Sermons, 1998
Folder 51: Sermons, 1999
Folder 52: Sermons, 2000-2001
Folder 53: Sermons, 2002-2003
Folder 54: Sermons, 2004
Folder 55: Sermons, 2006-2016
Folder 56: Good Friday sermons, undated
Folder 57: Sermons, undated, 1 of 5
Folder 58: Sermons, undated, 2 of 5
Folder 59: Sermons, undated, 3 of 5
Folder 60: Sermons, undated, 4 of 5
Folder 61: Sermons, undated, 5 of 5
Folder 62: Eulogies, 1993-2008
Folder 63: Eulogies, 2009-2019
Folder 64: Eulogies, undated
Box 3
Writings, continued
Folder 65: Wedding homilies and other material, 1990-2019 and undated
Folder 66: Ordination homilies and other material, 1987-2008 and undated
Folder 67: Sermons by others, 1976-1998
Folder 68: Writings in response to 9/11 attacks, 2001
Folder 69: “Appalachian Script” draft, undated
Folder 70: “Bread of the World” manuscript draft 1, undated
Folder 71: “Bread of the World” manuscript draft 2, undated
Folder 72: “First 30 Years of the Alfred I. Du Pont Institute” manuscript, undated
Folder 73: “Louisville 1977-1983” manuscript, undated
Folder 74: “Outside In: Letters to the Church” manuscript, undated
Folder 75: “Whatever Happened to the Liturgical Movement?” draft, undated
Folder 76: “Baroque” drafts, undated
Folder 77: “Contemporary Worship” drafts, undated
Folder 78: “Cranmer” drafts, undated
Folder 79: “Eastern” drafts, undated
Folder 80: “Fixed Place and Ceremonial West and Basilica” drafts, undated
Folder 81: “Jewish” drafts, undated
Folder 82: “Liturgy Sacred and Secular” drafts, undated
Folder 83: “Medieval” drafts, undated
Folder 84: “Post-Constantinian Offices and Church Year History and Time,” undated
Folder 85: “Reformation Continent” drafts, undated
Folder 86: “Renewal of Parish Worship” drafts, undated
Folder 87: “Rite and Baptistry First Century” drafts, undated
Folder 88: “Rite, Drama, and Symbol” drafts, undated
Folder 89: “Sacrifice” drafts, undated
Folder 90: “Worship in the 20th Century parts 1-4” drafts, undated
Folder 91: “First Century and Jewish, Agape Synaxis” drafts, undated
Folder 92: “Second and Third Century (Houte)” drafts, undated
Folder 93: “17th Century” drafts, undated
Folder 94: “19th Century” drafts, undated
Folder 95: Lectures, undated
Folder 96: Lectures and miscellaneous publications drafts, undated, 1 of 2
Folder 97: Lectures and miscellaneous publications drafts, undated, 2 of 2
Folder 98: Tower Hill School commencement speech and other material, 1941-1991
Folder 99: Louisville in the 1930s documentary scripts, undated
Folder 100: Book Reviews, 1997-2012 and undated
Folder 101: Art collecting/art museums writings/lectures, 2013 and undated
Folder 102: Publications on art, 1987 and undated
Folder 103: Publications on religion, 1968-2010
Folder 104: Rounding the Circle book, 2013
Folder 105: Border Crossing promotional/publication material, 2000-2001
Professional/Philanthropic Material
Folder 106: Alfred Shands Productions documentary list, 1980
Folder 107: Peabody Awards material, 1979
Folder 108: Governor’s Awards in the Arts material, 2010
Box 4
Professional/Philanthropic Material, continued
Folder 109: Book forwards, acceptance speeches, material written in Shands’s honor, undated
Folder 110: Art collecting/Shands collection material, 1989 and undated
Folder 111: Great Meadows exhibits and architect David Morton material, 2002-2013 and undated
Folder 112: Shands charitable contributions, 2017-2019
Folder 113: International Council of the Museum of Modern Art material, 1990-2019
Folder 114: International Council of the Museum of Modern Art member lists, 2006-2018
Folder 115: Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board meetings and other material, 2016-2021
Folder 116: International Council of Museums membership material, 2008-2019
Folder 117: Metropolitan Museum of Art membership material, 2017-2020
Folder 118: Donation of dresses to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2010
Folder 119: Nemours correspondence and fundraising committee material, 2009-2010
Folder 120: Nemours historical material, writings, etc., 1926-2010 and undated
Folder 121: Foxhollow material, 2002 and undated
Folder 122: Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation grant-giving/financial material, 1997-2016
Folder 123: Abbey at Gethsemani material, 1989-1993
Al Shands Personal Material
Folder 124: Personal documents and information, 1988-2021 and undated
Folder 125: Camp Mount Mitchell (Burnsville, N.C.) material, 1934-1935
Folder 126: Woodberry Forest School report cards and announcements, 1943-1945
Folder 127: Shands childhood drawings and writing exercises, undated
Folder 128: Shands schoolwork, 1935-1956 and undated
Folder 129: Shands early writings, 1948-1949
Folder 130: Shands early manuscript, undated
Folder 131: Shands Princeton senior thesis, 1950
Folder 132: Shands notebook, undated
Folder 133: Shands ordination certificate, 1955
Folder 134: Shands religious and documentary work clippings, 1954-2014 and undated
Folder 135: Shands collection/Great Meadows clippings/magazine articles, 1984-2017 and undated
Folder 136: Al and Mary Norton Shands various events clippings, 1967-2014
Family Material
Folder 137: Mary Norton Shands honors, 1994-2006
Folder 138: Mary Norton Shands Foxhollow clippings, 1994-2001
Folder 139: Elizabeth “Polly” Sheffer Prewitt Shands material, 1924-1993 and undated
Folder 140: Elizabeth “Polly” Sheffer Prewitt Shands notebook, 1924-1954
Folder 141: Elizabeth “Polly” Sheffer Prewitt Shands diary/event calendar, 1934
Folder 142: Elizabeth “Polly” Sheffer Prewitt Shands composition notebooks, 1933-1942 and undated
Folder 143: Elizabeth “Polly” Sheffer Prewitt Shands notebook and loose pages, ca. 1991
Folder 144: Elizabeth “Polly” Sheffer Prewitt Shands recipe books, undated, 1 of 2
Folder 145: Elizabeth “Polly” Sheffer Prewitt Shands recipe books, undated, 2 of 2
Box 5
Family Material, continued
Folder 146: Dr. Alfred Shands, Jr., correspondence concerning awards and honors, 1946-1969 and undated
Folder 147: Dr. Alfred Shands, Jr., awards and honors, 1913-1964
Folder 148: Dr. Alfred Shands, Jr., awards and honors, 1965-1972 and undated
Folder 149: Dr. Alfred Shands, Jr., clippings and pamphlets, 1926-1981 and undated
Folder 150: Dr. Alfred Shands, Jr., toast given at Al and Mary Shands’s wedding, 1967
Folder 151: Trip itinerary for “Dr. and Mrs. Alfred R. Shands, Jr., Mrs. Alfred I Du Pont” and others, 1951
Folder 152: Aurelius R. Shands material, 1895-1929
Folder 153: Jane Morton Norton biographical material, 1974-1989
Folder 154: Elizabeth Prewitt Taylor biography by Charles Taylor and other biographical material, 1960-1988
Folder 155: Jessie Ball Du Pont material, 1970
Folder 156: Estill family tree by Charles Taylor, undated
Folder 157: William Horner (1793-1853) genealogical material, diary transcript, and portrait information, 1955-2000
Folder 158: William Welsh family material, undated
Folder 159: Early family financial/business material, 1832-1865
Folder 160: Miscellaneous genealogical material, 1890-2000 and undated
Folder 161: Speed family picnic material, 1981
Folder 162: Church histories and programs, undated
Folder 163: Quotes, prayers, inspirational messages, undated
Folder 164: Miscellaneous material, undated
Oversized Folders
Folder 165: Dr. Alfred Shands, Jr., oversized awards and honors, 1912-1972 and undated
Folder 166: Miscellaneous oversized material, 1854-1967
Subject Headings
Alfred I. Du Pont Institute.
Alfred Shands Productions, Inc.
Art – Private Collections.
Art Patronage.
Camp Mount Mitchell (Burnsville, N.C.)
Children – Hospitals – Delaware – Wilmington.
COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-
Documentary films – Production and direction.
Du Pont, Jessie Ball, 1884-1970.
Episcopal Church.
Eulogies.
Foxhollow (Louisville, Ky.)
Great Meadows (Louisville, Ky.)
Norton, Jane Morton, 1908-1988.
Prewitt family.
September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001.
Shands family.
Shands, Alfred Rives, Jr., 1899-1981.
Shands, Aurelius Rives, 1860-1941.
Shands, Elizabeth Sheffer Prewitt, 1898-1993.
Shands, Mary Norton, 1930-2009.
Sheffer family.
St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel (Washington, D.C.)
St. Clement’s Episcopal Church (Louisville, Ky.)
St. Francis in the Fields (Harrods Creek, Ky.)
St. John’s Episcopal Church (Harbor Springs, Mich.)
Taylor, Elizabeth Prewitt, 1899-1960.
Theology.
Tower Hill School (Wilmington, Del.)
Weddings.
Woodberry Forest School (Woodberry, Va.)
