The Bell tolls no more

500 year old bell maker closing down



Though the foundry(London’s Whitechapel Bell Foundry ) is perhaps best known for casting Big Ben (the bell that rings from the Palace of Westminster's iconic tower), it also helped create the most famous sounds of 18th-century America. It sent at least 27 bells to the colonies during the 1700s alone. A document at Christ Church, Philadelphia, where Benjamin Franklin and other forefathers worshiped, lists a 1702 bell made for the church as the earliest. Fifty years later, the Liberty Bell (first called the State House Bell) arrived, and then, in 1754, a peal of eight bells for Christ Church. Other bells made their way to churches in Williamsburg, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, and New York City.

In 1751, Pennsylvania statesman Isaac Norris II commissioned Whitechapel’s most famous American bell to hang from the State House (now Independence Hall). Upon arrival from London, the “State House Bell,” as it was then called, cracked during a sound test, so Philadelphia bell founders Pass and Stowe melted and recast it.



Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/after-nearly-500-years-business-company-cast-liberty-bell-ceasing-all-operations-180961473/#RrT5pPSvyIiSfoeJ.99