Philip Spiess
It was a quiet evening in January of 1896, in the Cincinnati suburb of East Walnut Hills. All at once the quiet was shattered -- and windows, too (for two miles around, it was said) -- by the thunderous voice of a great bell resounding throughout the neighborhood and heard even fifteen miles away. It was the ringing of the new bell in the tower of St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, cast in October, 1895, by the Cincinnati bell foundry of E. W. Vanduzen Co. (formerly Vanduzen & Tifts), successor to the old Buckeye Bell Foundry. The bell, known as "Joseph" (also "Big Joe" -- named after the largest donor to the bell project, Joseph G. Buddeke), is now the second-largest free-swinging bell in the world and the largest ever cast in the United States. It still hangs in the tower of St. Francis de Sales Church, but it has never been rung again by swinging. Indeed, the parish priests declared that the bell shall "remain immobile forever," because the trembling of the bell tower and the crumbling of the tower's mortar on its first being rung was simply considered too unsafe.
"Joseph," which rings a sonorous E-flat, measures 7 feet high with a diameter of 9 feet, and is hung 125 feet up in the bell tower; it weighs 17.5 tons. Thus it took a twelve-horse team to haul the bell from the foundry at Second Street and Broadway, up the Gilbert Avenue hill, and down Madison Road to the church. The bell's 640-pound clapper, which initially required six boys to pull it by means of hempen ropes, is no longer used; today the bell is rung with an oversized foot-hammer tapping its rim. "Joseph" is struck three times daily, at 6 a.m., at 12 noon, and at 6 p.m. (for the Angelus), followed by the chiming of four smaller bells which rest above it and which are known as the "ladies in waiting."
Historically, Cincinnati has been an important bell-producing town. One can still find field bells surviving on old plantations along the Mississippi River that were cast in Cincinnati and made their way down river; some can even be found as far afield as California. The national Journal of Fine Arts for November, 1851, commends the city for G. W. Coffin & Co.'s "Buckeye Bell Foundry" (1837) and for George L. Hanks' bell foundry and "the exceeding purity of their work" on peals of bells, chimes, and steamboat, factory, and smaller bells. Circa 1851, Hanks' foundry cast the 3,400-pound tenor bell named "Great Peter" for St. Peter in Chains Roman Catholic Cathedral, a bell decorated with medallions of Biblical scenes and a heavily fruited grapevine in high relief.
As those of you residing in Cincinnati probably know, this tradition lives on in the Verdin Company bell foundry, a Cincinnati business since 1842. Curiously enough, the French immigrant founder of the company's six generations of Verdin family bell-makers was named Francois de Sales Verdin, prefiguring the like-named church of the "Big Joseph" bell; he founded the company, the oldest family-owned manufacturing company in Ohio, with his brother, Michel Verdin. Among the company's landmark events were the invention of an electric winder for clocks (1910); the first electric bell ringer (1927); and the introduction of electronic bell carillons (1946). Verdin acquired the Vanduzen Company in 1955, and in 1999 it designed and cast (in France) the world's largest swinging bell, the 66,600-pound World Peace Bell, to commemorate the Millenium. The Verdin Bell Museum, in the Over-the-Rhine section of downtown Cincinnati, was established in historic St. Paul's Church in 1981.
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