You know how sometimes you’re wandering down the road in your brain, musing the random questions you don’t necessarily expect answers to, and a little research suddenly plunges you deep into the gopher hole?
That’s what happened when I was wondering the other day about the curfew bell that used to ring every evening at 9 from the steeple in Ashfield’s Town Hall. Reading about curfews imposed around the country amid the pandemic, I wondered what event had first launched Ashfield’s curfew bell.
I went to my traditional go-to man, 93-year-old Norm Nye, and he said it had rung since he was a kid, reminding young’uns that 9 o’clock was just about as late as they needed to be out, though he didn’t know what started it.
So I went to Nancy Garvin of the Ashfield Historical Society, and, while Nancy is the first to say she is a researcher and no certified historian, Nancy knows her Ashfield history!
Turns out, nightly curfew bells aren’t just a quaint New England way to wrangle the kids. They ring all the way back to medieval times, when they were sounded to remind people to bank their fires to avoid burning the house down after everyone had gone to bed. The word “curfew” is even a many-generational bastardization of “Carre Feu,” “Cover Fire” in Old French.
In Ashfield, the tradition had an equally practical role to play in everyday life; farmers in the 18th and 19th centuries had no wristwatches, or even clocks, so the bell was rung from the church steeple to announce noon and then at 9 to tell them the cows had come home and they could, too. Local deaths were announced by the bell. When someone died, the bell tolled for five minutes to get people’s attention, then once for every year the newly-deceased had walked the Earth.
The church that housed the bell became Ashfield’s Town Hall in 1856 (a good story I’ll tell you one day if you behave), but the bell remained in the tower and ringing it became a municipal job, no longer just rung by the goodness of the neighbors.
Now, as you can imagine, ringing the official town bell was a sought-after job, so much so that the town auctioned the privilege to the highest bidder. Josephus Crafts (early owner of the store that would later become Elmer’s) first won the ringing right for 6.25 cents. Later, WH Elmer, (no relation to Elmer who eventually bought the store, but an early occupant of the house I live in now) wrangled the bell-ringing privilege by bidding a whole 10 cents.
As the town grew up, bell-ringing became an actual job and people were paid to do it. Roswell Church, Town Hall janitor, was paid $30 a year from 1907 to 1911 to ring it, still by old-fashioned rope.
In 1925 the town hired Robert Nye, Norm’s father, to whip the operation into the 20th century. Using the motor from an old cream separator, powered by the motor from an old washing machine, he hooked up a contraption that did away with rope-pulling and enabled the bell to be rung from the new telephone office a whole street away! With that, bell-ringing pay dropped to $10/year since all you had to do to ring it was push a button.
That cream separator is still up in the tower and still works, though the original motor only held out until the 1990s. Local engineering-types Stuart Harris and Bill Perlman repaired it by putting out the call for a new old washing machine motor, and housed it in a large Maxwell House coffee can to protect it from the elements.
The telephone office closed in 1956, and a newfangled Tork timer was put in, so the bell could ring without input from anyone. That timer gave out a few years ago, and when Mr. Perlman called Tork to see about getting a new one, the guy told him they hadn’t made those things in 40 years and the only place to find one might be in a museum.
Dang it’s hard to keep technology going, isn’t it?
Asking around town, the history of that bell and town communication has grown into enough chapters I could write a whole book about it, and I will! But not in this single column. I’ll add a second chapter about it next month.
In the meantime, I’ve decided to launch a petition to get that 9 p.m. curfew bell ringing again. I mentioned that to Mr. Harris who laughed and said, “I’ve got a long list of things I have to do in a day.” The ensuing silence said, “And repairing that’s not on it.”
But I’ve got research to do and more history to tell. Meet me here next month for the next exciting episode of “Communication! The Old Cool Ways!”
Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.