“witticisms” hurled at them that they hurriedly prepared for a second recasting. “If this should fail,” Norris wrote, “we will…send the unfortunate Bell” back to Whitechapel for remolding. A frantic six weeks later, the recast bell was ready to be toted to the belfry. This version at least rang, but its sound pleased few. “I Own I do not like it,” Norris wrote, and ordered a replacement from Whitechapel. He planned to return the original bell for credit, but the assembly ultimately kept both. The “Old Bell” hung in the tower, while the “Sister Bell” hung in a secondary cupola on the fourth-floor roof where it tolled the hours. The Old Bell was still hanging in the State House steeple in July 1776, though the tower was so rotted it was dangerous to enter.
The drama of that summer was marked by four key dates: July 2, when the Congress voted for independence; July 4, when it adopted Jefferson’s document; July 8, when the Declaration was read aloud for the first time; and August 2, when most members signed. The only date for which evidence exists of bells being rung in the city is July 8. “There were bonfires, ringing bells, with other great demonstrations of joy,” wrote a witness. But no one specified that the State House Bell was among those sounded, and there’s reason to at least be skeptical, considering the poor state of the belfry. Five years later the tower was considered so rickety it was removed entirely and the bell retired to the fourth floor, where it remained mute for the next forty years and was rung only on ceremonial occasions. Twice officials actually sold the bell, but both times they balked before handing it over. For all practical purposes, Pennsylvania’s E-flat bell was impounded, a forgotten slave to its own misfortune, unable to peal even for its own release. (The Sister Bell was also removed, in 1828, when the new bell tower was finished. It was given to a Catholic church, which was burned in 1844 in a wave of anti-Catholic riots. The bell crashed to the floor and broke into smithereens. Workers collected all the pieces they could find and recast them into a 150-pound bell, down from the original 2,080 pounds. The recast version now hangs at Villanova University.)
During one of the original bell’s ringings, likely in the 1820s or 1830s, it cracked again. Some witnesses claimed the cracking occurred on the visit of Marquis de Lafayette in 1824; others said it followed the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act in Britain in 1829; still others suggested it was at the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1835. The truth, Diethorn explained, is that the bell was probably cracking all along, just not visibly. On Washington’s Birthday 1843, the crack had become so substantial that it rendered the bell unusable. Officials performed a repair technique called stop drilling, in which they actually removed chunks of metal to prevent the jagged edges from scraping, thereby creating the inch-wide gap that became the bell’s most distinctive feature. The rounded edges from this procedure are still visible. At the time, officials actually took the metal fragments and made them into trinkets, which they sold. “It was like buying a piece of Noah’s ark jewelry,” Diethorn said.
So why such misfortune?
“In effect, the bell was doomed from the start,” she stressed. “They were taking the same metal, subjecting it to heat, breaking it down, and reconstituting it. Plus, their casting techniques were highly flawed. Today, they use sterile environments and humans don’t get anywhere near the bells when they’re being cast.”
I asked her why the bell came to have such meaning.
“It’s hard to get your heart around a building,” she said. “But the bell is timeless, in its shape, its function. It’s easier to understand on an emotional level.”
And so much of that emotion, she added, comes from the inscription. “You have to remember, the cultural identity
The drama of that summer was marked by four key dates: July 2, when the Congress voted for independence; July 4, when it adopted Jefferson’s document; July 8, when the Declaration was read aloud for the first time; and August 2, when most members signed. The only date for which evidence exists of bells being rung in the city is July 8. “There were bonfires, ringing bells, with other great demonstrations of joy,” wrote a witness. But no one specified that the State House Bell was among those sounded, and there’s reason to at least be skeptical, considering the poor state of the belfry. Five years later the tower was considered so rickety it was removed entirely and the bell retired to the fourth floor, where it remained mute for the next forty years and was rung only on ceremonial occasions. Twice officials actually sold the bell, but both times they balked before handing it over. For all practical purposes, Pennsylvania’s E-flat bell was impounded, a forgotten slave to its own misfortune, unable to peal even for its own release. (The Sister Bell was also removed, in 1828, when the new bell tower was finished. It was given to a Catholic church, which was burned in 1844 in a wave of anti-Catholic riots. The bell crashed to the floor and broke into smithereens. Workers collected all the pieces they could find and recast them into a 150-pound bell, down from the original 2,080 pounds. The recast version now hangs at Villanova University.)
During one of the original bell’s ringings, likely in the 1820s or 1830s, it cracked again. Some witnesses claimed the cracking occurred on the visit of Marquis de Lafayette in 1824; others said it followed the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act in Britain in 1829; still others suggested it was at the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1835. The truth, Diethorn explained, is that the bell was probably cracking all along, just not visibly. On Washington’s Birthday 1843, the crack had become so substantial that it rendered the bell unusable. Officials performed a repair technique called stop drilling, in which they actually removed chunks of metal to prevent the jagged edges from scraping, thereby creating the inch-wide gap that became the bell’s most distinctive feature. The rounded edges from this procedure are still visible. At the time, officials actually took the metal fragments and made them into trinkets, which they sold. “It was like buying a piece of Noah’s ark jewelry,” Diethorn said.
So why such misfortune?
“In effect, the bell was doomed from the start,” she stressed. “They were taking the same metal, subjecting it to heat, breaking it down, and reconstituting it. Plus, their casting techniques were highly flawed. Today, they use sterile environments and humans don’t get anywhere near the bells when they’re being cast.”
I asked her why the bell came to have such meaning.
“It’s hard to get your heart around a building,” she said. “But the bell is timeless, in its shape, its function. It’s easier to understand on an emotional level.”
And so much of that emotion, she added, comes from the inscription. “You have to remember, the cultural identity
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