By David Perry, dperry@lowellsun.com
Lowell was once a city of bells.
The sharpness of the bell's clang cut through winter's crisp air and summer's thick heat alike, alerting the city's people to time.
Time for work, for lunch, and for work's end. Time to worship, to marry, and in emergencies, no time to spare.
One 19th century Lowell bell, which had been hauled to a home and upended to become a rather unique flower pot, ended up downtown yesterday, mounted on granite slabs, a shrine to the steel and mettle of the people who heard its call.
Shortly before noon, in a cool fall mist on a triangle of sod where Prescott meets Central Street, officials pulled back a blue tarp covering the bell. About 100 people watched.
"I just wish my parents were here to see this," said Warren Draper Jr.
His parents, Warren and Ann Draper, owned the Centralville house at 116 Jewett St., where the bell was partially buried and used as a planter for eight decades.
But Al Rosen of Billerica, a longtime family friend of the Drapers, first noticed the bell more than 20 years ago.
"I thought, you know, it doesn't fit. It's kind of an extravagant flower pot," said Rosen. He started calling the city's historians and eventually, they took notice.
The bell, cast from steel by Naylor Vickers Company in Sheffield, England in 1860, is believed by historians to have been used at the Old Market House at 40 Market St., which was a market before it became a police station. It served as a fire alarm before the city's first firehouse was built on Palmer Street.
For the last five years, it was the "mystery bell." People wondered: Was it from a mill, a clock tower, a church?
The restoration of the bell, which cost about $25,000 from initial cleanup to the informational kiosk that will join it within a month or so, was undertaken by the Lowell Heritage Partnership (LHP), a 9-year-old alliance of nearly two dozen local preservation, cultural and civic groups*.
The land was donated by Eastern Bank, whose president, Robert Rivers, said handing over the V-shaped, 500-square-foot lot was the bank's "modest role" is Lowell's ongoing historic preservation. The Rotary Club of Lowell and Theodore Edson Parker Foundation were among others behind the bell's pristine new look and home.
It is at a central downtown corner, loaded with foot traffic and well-traveled roads on both sides.
The mayor, "Bud" Caulfield, spoke, noting Lowell was known as The Bell City during the 19th century for its wealth of bells, tolling across the city, but especially in its many mills.
And Richard Lockhart, LHP president, reminded the gathering that "people's lives revolved around" bells 150 years ago. From their labor, the city rose and thrived. Lockhart asked that those who pass the spot not think just of granite and steel, but "think of those people."
This story appeared in the Lowell Sun on Wednesday, November 25, 2009
The Lowell Heritage Partnership (LHP) is a coalition formed in 2000 to preserve and enhance Lowell's natural, built, and cultural heritage through community partnership. The LHP evolved from a discussion among grassroots activists begun at the historic Spalding House and was further developed in a public forum at Middlesex Community College. Recognizing the need for broad-based advocacy for quality of life issues that are rooted in Lowell's distinctive character and resources, leaders from several organizations and agencies have pledged to collaborate in pursuit of common objectives.