Mystery of the Bell

This is a request for information to solve a mystery surrounding the demolition of the old Richland County Courthouse.

Earlier this year we located the cupola of the old courthouse, cast off in the weeds at a local farm in 1969. It now resides in the warehouse building across the street from Oak Hill Cottage. Read about its rescue at https://oakhillcottage.org/2022/08/16/the-temple-of-justice/.

The 1870 Richland County courthouse had a typical clock tower of its day. Four enormous dials faced the points of the compass with hands driven by a Seth Thomas mechanism one story below inside the tower. The mechanism sat on a stand about four feet high, driven by a weight that slowly descended in the building before being wound back up once a week. And it struck the bell every hour, reportedly to be heard up to five miles away when the breeze was right.

The question of “what happened to the bell?” piqued the interest of Dottie Kasper, one of the volunteer tour guides at the Cottage. She checked with some old friends and brought back the evidence that proves it could be out there somewhere and didn’t end up in a landfill or melted down, at least not for a time. Remembering the bell ensconced in the front yard of a little house on Reform Street she put together the chronology of how it got there and where it went, and she has photos!

The story

Don Smith was a local self-employed excavator as she remembers it. He made a deal with the demolition contractor to help him extract the 3200 lb. bell from the clock tower and get it to the ground. The way it was taken out of the tower wasn’t too neatly done, as the photos attest, but the bell was saved. Though still Smith’s bell at that time, it ended up in the front yard of a friend on Reform Street, mounted with its yoke and painted black.

Smith later gave the bell to Dennis Caldwell, the demolition contractor, and from there the trail has gone cold. Caldwell’s widow, Evelyn, remembers the bell and that Dennis sold it to someone but nothing more.

The bronze bell was cast by the Meneely & Kimberly Company in Troy, New York. It’s around four feet in diameter at its mouth, which is one of the largest of the sizes of bells used with the Seth Thomas mechanisms. The bell in the clock tower at Upper Sandusky courthouse is similar, and the clock tower a near identical design, though with a copper dome and cupola rather than tin as here in Mansfield. Though our bell and clock were c. 1870, they were reinstalled in the new tower built in 1908 after the 1903 redesign of the roof.

If still painted black, underneath the paint will likely be found “GROUND OBSERVER CORPS” that our intrepid cadre of WWII plane spotters stenciled thereon. Contact the Richland County Historical Society at admin@oakhillcottage.org if you have any information about what happened to the bell. The RCHS operates Oak Hill Cottage, a house museum, with Sunday tours from April through December, 2pm to 5pm. Also on the grounds are a carriage house which serves as a visitor center and a warehouse serving as a window restoration workshop and storage.