“Reducing the Number of Bells daily rung”?

I started this run of postings about bell-ringing in mid-eighteenth-century Boston quoting the town’s sextons on when they rang the bells in 1744.

That almost certainly wasn’t the same schedule they were following decades later during the Revolutionary period, however.

Only seven years later, on 14 May 1751, the town meeting discussed cutting back on the bell-ringing to save public money:

There are one or two Lesser Articles in the Selectmens Accompts in which the Committee apprehend there be some Saving, as in Reducing the Number of Bells daily rung, and at different hours of the day, the Committee being of Opinion that two Bells rung in different parts of the Town viz at 5 in the morning, one at noon, & nine in the Evening, together with the Bell at the Opening of the Market would be sufficient.

Then the Second Paragraph in said Report, was Debated, and Voted that the same be accepted, and that no Bells be rung for the future but the Bell at the old North Church, the Bell at Dr. [Joseph] Sewall’s Church [i.e., Old South Meeting-House] Vizt, at the hours of five, one and nine o’Clock, and the old Brick Church at the hour of Eleven.

That new system didn’t work for everyone, however. The following March the town meeting faced “The Petition of sundry Inhabitants that the Bell at the Revd. Messrs. [William] Welsteed and [Ellis] Gray’s [New Brick] Meeting house may be rung at eleven o’Clock in the forenoon.” After some consideration, the people voted to try that, at least for a while.

Of course, that opened the door for more requests. In August, “inhabitants at the Southerly end of the Town” petitioned “the Bell at Mr. [Mather] Byles’s Meeting house may be rung as heretofore.” The town empowered the selectmen to determine when that bell would be rung.

It’s possible that sextons asked members of their congregations to push for them to get some of that bell-ringing money. In 1755 Boston’s bell-ringers won a raise to “forty shillings p Annum…for each time said Bells shall be rung” over the course of a day.

As of March 1762 the town decided on this wake-up call:

The Town voted that the following Bells should be rung at Five o’Clock every Morning, excepting Lord’s Day Morning, viz. At the South End, the Rev. Mr. Byles’s:—Middle of the Town, the Old Brick so called:——At the North End, the Old North so called.

Gawen Brown installed a clock in the Old South Meeting-House steeple in 1770. It’s conceivable that over these same decades more Bostonians came to own watches and clocks. The church bells might not have been as necessary to signal the passage of time as before.

The siege of Boston disrupted civic and religious life for years after the British military sailed away. The Old North Meeting-House and the steeple of the West Meeting-House were gone, pulled down for firewood. British dragoons had turned the Old South Meeting-House into a riding stable. The evacuation took away the Anglican ministers and many of their congregants. Boston’s overall population remained much lower than before the war for a long time.

I suspect those changes were behind the town meeting vote on 5 June 1776 for a new, pared-back schedule: “ringing Dr. Sewalls Bell [at Old South] One O’Clock & Nine O’Clock, and Dr. [Charles] Chaunceys Bell [at the Old Brick] at 11.O.Clock.”

Gradually over the course of the war more bells were put onto the schedule. Though in October 1782 the selectmen told the sexton at Old South to hold off “untill Monday next, as a Daughter of Mrs. Coffin who lives near said Meeting House is very ill & is much disturbed by the ringing.” The bells in the churches and Faneuil Hall remained part of the city’s fire alarm system deep into the nineteenth century.