A 500-pound bronze bell that rang in events of Lancaster City in the 1800s, from election results to the early morning openings at Central Market, has come home.
On Monday afternoon, the Heritage Center of Lancaster County brought the bell back to Penn Square after more than 150 years. It had been in the cupola of an East Petersburg farmhouse since 1852.
Now it will be on display in the main exhibition hall of the Heritage Center.
"It will be positioned next to the clockworks of the clock that was also in the bell tower of the old courthouse," says Peter Seibert, the Heritage Center's president. "The clockworks was the mechanism that actually struck the bell, so it's a reunion for them."
The bell was donated by Tobias Hershey Rohrer and Peter B. Rohrer, whose family had housed the bell since 1852.
The Rohrer family recently sold the farm, but knowing the history of the bell, reserved the rights to it, Seibert says.
Clarke Hess, a board member of the Heritage Center, and David Johnson, both friends of the Rohrer family, talked to them about donating it to the Heritage Center, and they agreed.
The Rohrer family purchased the bell after the courthouse was torn down in 1852.
Built in 1732, the courthouse was used by the Pennsylvania legislature during the American Revolution and again when Lancaster was the state capital, according to the Heritage Center.
It sat where the Penn Square monument is now located.
The bell is at least the second one cast for the building and, according to Seibert, there may have been more. One bell that had rung at the courthouse was destroyed in a fire at a coppersmith's shop in the 1890s.
"We speculate that this was the only courthouse bell that survived," Seibert says.
It was made in 1825 by John Wilbank of Philadelphia.
The bell could be heard well beyond the city limits in those quiet days, and Seibert says people would set their timepieces by it. Shoppers knew market was open for the morning by the peal of the bell.
While it has hung from the farmhouse cupola for more than 150 years, there was one occasion when it was brought back into the city.
In 1918, in the midst of World War I, Lancaster City built a replica of the original courthouse called Liberty House, to encourage people to buy war bonds.
According to a local newspaper article, published on Oct. 14, 1918, the bell was used to declare election results.
As the newspaper reported: "Many's the time, it is said, when its lusty peal told of a political victory in the bitter party fights in the county. Its chief opponent as an election announcer, says its present owner (F. Bachman Rohrer) was the steam whistle at the time on the Hostetter distillery, which blew off at Democratic victories, while the bell spread the tiding when the Republicans won."
Historic bell returns to city
