History: Wakefield's Paul Revere Foundry Bell

The third meetinghouse of the First Parish of the old Town of Reading stood on the approximate location of its lineal descendant:  the First Parish Congregational Church of Wakefield.  The congregation’s first meetinghouse, erected around 1645, had stood near the north corner of today’s Main & Albion Streets; the second meetinghouse, built in 1689 was a small, square building with a small tower, located near the old Burying Ground, which was established in the same year. 

In 1768, the third meetinghouse was built:  it was a much larger structure with a tall graceful spire topped with a gilded weathervane, the work of Jonathon Cowdrey, a craftsman who lived in what we today call the Hartshorne House.   In 1815, this lovely spire was toppled in the “Great Gale of 1815, “ which is considered to have been the strongest hurricane to have hit New England until the Hurricane of 1938.

Subsequently, the toppled steeple was replaced by a dome.  It wasn’t as graceful and elegant as the original spire, but it was deemed safer.  In the same year, the town ordered a bell from the foundry of Paul Revere & Sons.  Revere, who was a silversmith, in 1787 had established a foundry in Boston, where he cast iron wares, and later cannon and bells.    His own active involvement with the foundry had ended in 1811, but the foundry went on under the stewardship of his sons.  The bell that was ordered for Reading was typical of the church bells made by his foundry.  Weighing in at 929 lbs. (approximately half the size of the Liberty Bell, which had weighed 2000 lbs at its initial casting in Whitechapel Foundry in England), the bell cost the $418.50, which was a huge amount of money at the time.   The bell was paid for by the Town of South Reading.

Bells were enormously important community assets in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  After the bell was hung in the belfry of the church, it rang a noon and 9 p.m. daily, warned of fires, and was tolled for funerals and special events.   The bell served the town very well in its church location until 1859 when the Congregational church was undergoing a substantial remodeling and renovation.  At that time, the bell was placed in the Town House.

The Town House had been built in 1834 to serve as the center of government for the town of South Reading.  Our town had broken off from the old town of Reading to form the separate town of South Reading in 1812, but for twenty-two years, the seat of government had been the Congregational meetinghouse.  The Town House stood on the Common, on the north side of Main Street near the location of the Bandstand.  It served as the center of town government until it was replaced by the grand Town Hall donated by Cyrus Wakefield in 1871.  Two years later, the Town House was sold to clothing merchant John M. Cate, and the building was moved to the corner of Main and Salem Street and remodeled.  The town, however, maintained the ownership of the bell, “wheel and rope.”

In 1888, the bell was moved again, this time to the tower of the High School, then located on the corner of Common & Lafayette Streets.  In its new location, the bell continued in use as a fire alarm.  In 1875, a definite code had been established for fire alarm signals.  Twenty strokes of the bell indicated a general alarm fire; 12 strokes meant that the fire was in the center of town; 10 strokes meant that the fire was in the west side of town; 8 strokes for the north district; six strokes for the east district; four strokes for the Woodville district and two strokes for Greenwood. 

The bell was finally retired as a fire bell in 1930.  After the WPA renovations of the old High School building removed the original tower and transformed the buidling into the Lafayette Building in 1937-1938, the town’s bell found a home in the lobby of Beebe Memorial Library, where it resided until the Library’s renovations in 1996-1998.   At that time, the bell was taken off its cradle and established in a new home:   a specially made glass cube in the lobby of the Galvin Middle School, where it serves to remind the students and visitors of the town’s rich and varied history.