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Date: 8/24/2021
AMHERST – A church bell with roots in the town going back to 1820 is now part of the collections of the Amherst Historical Society.
George Naughton, president of the society, announced the bell from the Second Congregational Church of Amherst was delivered to the society on Aug. 13.
While it is being preserved, it will not be on display in a permanent structure just yet.
Naughton explained to Reminder Publishing, “The bell won’t fit inside the museum building. We’ll need to construct a small shelter or gazebo on the museum grounds to properly display it, and to tell its colorful story.”
He continued, “No, we don’t have a timeline for constructing a shelter. It’s complicated. When the Emerson sisters deeded the Strong House to the Amherst Historical Society in 1916, it was with the stipulation that the house and grounds were to remain unaltered. We have been working with lawyers to be able to amend this stipulation, and while we anticipate a positive result (we are not the only historical society to have this problem) there are still a couple of steps to be gone through.”
He said, “Now that we actually have the bell, the board can always begin to plan a permanent structure for it, since we anticipate a positive result from our legal petition. So, we need to think about the size and location of the structure. In the meantime, it is sitting on blocks at the end of one of our garden beds, covered with a tarpaulin, which we can always remove when we have a lawn event. The bell used to reside in a church tower, so it was always somewhat exposed to the weather.”
He added, “I don't think the bell has been in indoor storage since it was taken out of the old church steeple. Keep in mind that the artifact measures about 4 or 5 feet in each dimension and weighs around 1,500 pounds. I think it was simply parked on the grounds of the Jewish Community of Amherst (JCA) until the Amherst Historical Society was able to arrange transport to our museum grounds.”
He recounted part of the bell’s history and said, “The history of the First Church states that the Second Church was founded in 1782, in opposition to the ordination of Rev. David Parsons, a staunch Tory, as minister of the First Church. Passions ran so high that the first parish was named Zion and the second parish was named Sodom – you can guess who did the naming. There are even town records proposing the construction of a public road, which became Triangle Street, so the members of the Second Church would not have to see the First Church building as they went to worship on Sunday morning.
“The original Second Congregational meeting house was erected in 1784, but a church belfry was not constructed until 1820. The inscription on the bell says it was first cast in 1820, so it would have been purchased at that time. The History of the Town of Amherst (p 213) says that ‘[i]n 1879 the old bell was broken and a new one was purchased;’ according to the inscription, the bell was ‘Recast [in] 1879,’ by the Troy Bell Foundry in Troy, NY.”
Recasting, Naughton explained, means melting down the bell and using the metal to make a new bell.
According to Naughton, the Second Congregational Church continued in existence until 1976, when the property was sold to the JCA. The bell was offered to the Amherst Historical Society as a donation, and Leader Home Centers arranged a flatbed truck and forklift to transport the artifact, which weighs three-fourths of a ton, to the museum.