Museum Matters

The magnificent bell that stands in front of the Little Church on Grafton wasn’t always there. It was originally purchased and installed in a bell tower of the First Christian Church at the corner of Grafton and Live Oak St. The First Christian Church first started on their new building in November of 1889. Several years later, they started adding rooms for Sunday School and community use. This fast church growth took place from 1901 - 1905. It probably was during this period that a church bell was purchased and installed in the newly built bell tower. In the Christian Church history, compiled by Marvin Farris, T.Y. Lewis was on the building committee at that time. Lewis wrote a poem about the bell that he sent to the Cincinnati Bell Foundry. In the poem he says that the bell weighs 800 pounds and is 40 inches in diameter at the bottom. It cost $140 dollars when purchased. He stated that the bell could be heard 5 miles away. The poem was written for the Cincinnati Bell Foundry Co. That company came along years later. So our bell must have been purchased used.

Looking at the casting mark on the bell, it was made by the Blymyer, Norton & Company in Cincinnati Ohio. This mark indicates that the bell is quite old. The company was in business only from 1866 to 1872 making the bell older than any buildings in Dublin north of the railroad tracks. The Evelyn Goldberg Briggs Library in Columbia Iron Creek, Wisconsin has a similar bell made by the same company. On their web site it states that “it was probably made shortly after the Civil War. In fact, the Cincinnati area had access to surplus Confederate and Union munitions during that time. Blymyer probably melted down and re-poured scrap civil war armaments that were available in the Cincinnati area. It is entirely possible that this beautifully cast bell is made from reclaimed civil war armaments.”

Another web site states that only a few bells that were cast by Blymyer, Norton & Co. still exist. Ours may be only the fourth bell made by this company that is known of.

I attended the Christian Church as a child and remember the ringing of the bell when it was in the church bell tower. Rusty Salyer sometimes climbed into the tower just to check on things. One Sunday, he discovered the wood in the tower was badly weathered. He and Jack Scott talked about it. They were concerned that the heavy bell would come crashing down when the rope that rung the bell was pulled. The support beams in the tower were badly rotted as well. They decided to rope off the entrance so the if the bell dropped, no one would be hurt. I remember women were concerned that they couldn’t enter the church in the door they always used.

The church had also paid to have the walls in the sanctuary re-papered. Because of the weathered siding outside, this new wall paper got badly damaged after a heavy rain storm. For those reasons, the historic church was torn down and a new church rebuilt reusing much of the original wood. The bell was placed outside of the new 1958 church and stayed there for over 50 years. With the renovation of The Little Church on Grafton, the bell was moved there and has been on proud display since Mary Yantis placed it there in 2011.