Head Docent Lois Oliver Enriches the Visitor Experience

On a recent weekday, a man and a woman walked into the Chapel to take in its architectural splendor. Soon they were deep in conversation with Lois Oliver, the Chapel’s head docent. With her laser pointer in hand, Oliver offered some keys to understanding the building, such as the buttresses hidden in the walls and the order of the windows. After fifteen minutes the couple headed off, giving profuse thanks to Oliver for her insights.

Oliver has been volunteering as a docent at the Chapel for two decades, enriching the experience of thousands of visitors through her knowledge of the Chapel’s history, construction, and anecdotes. For her, serving visitors in this way is a way of sharing a passion.

“I think they should appreciate the blessing of having an elegant, beautiful, totally biblical space,” says Oliver, a member of the Congregation at Duke

Chapel and a retired associate dean for medical education at Duke. “I just want them to appreciate all the people who worked on building it.”

Oliver’s service as a docent dates back to the time of her husband’s death in 2003. She joined a group of people who rotated giving tours of the building after Sunday morning services.

“We were all learning on the fly about the Chapel,” she says. “The first year or so, the tours were focused on the inside of the building—the windows, the woodwork, and the stone.”

With the arrival of Chapel Dean Sam Wells in 2005, the docent program expanded to weekdays with the goal of imparting the aesthetic and religious value of the space. Based on the success of the program, Oliver was invited in 2015 to teach a course on the history of the Chapel through Duke’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

“I spent a whole summer in the archives of the library,” she says about her research for the six-week class. “You wouldn’t believe the names I found—the builders, the artisans, the stone masons. I began training the other docents about what I had learned.”

Being a docent is not only about imparting knowledge, it’s also about meeting all kinds of people. Oliver remembers giving a tour to a family and at the end the father put a $50 bill in her hand. “That was my biggest tip,” she says. (She put the money in the Chapel’s donation box.)

She regularly encounters patients and their families coming over from Duke Hospital. Oliver tells a moving story about one woman being treated for cancer at the hospital who would visit the Chapel with her husband every time she had an appointment. One day the couple came to the Chapel and asked to see Oliver.

“They walked all the way around the nave and came back,” Oliver recalls, “and she threw her arms around me and said, ‘I’m cured.’”