HOME & GARDEN
The mystery of the bell buried on the family farm
Alan D. Miller
Special to The Columbus Dispatch
Aug. 8, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET
The heavy iron bell buried in weeds next to a falling-down workshop on the family farm held many mysteries
Why was it there? Where did it come from? What was its story? What might happen to it in the future?
The answers to those questions are now woven into the history of our farm, which has been tended by members of my family since 1814
These are the stories that old-building owners should ask, even if the house or barn hasn’t been part of the family for two centuries. Knowing about the people who lived there and how they lived brings these charming old buildings to life
So when you buy an old place, ask the previous owners for their memories about the people who lived there – about the door-jam pencil marks measuring the growth of children, about the unusual light fixture in the kitchen or that bright-red, etched glass window above the front door
In my case, because I peppered my grandparents and parents with questions, I can walk into the barn, close my eyes and see my great-grandpa slinging hay into the mow or my great-great-grandfather cutting down the oak and hickory trees that would become the bones of that barn in 1904
I spent summers on the three Holmes County farms, where two sets of grandparents and a great-aunt and -uncle lived at the time. And as a weird kid who loved history and all things old, I relished the opportunity to explore the outbuildings filled with long-forgotten treasures – old furniture, tools, car and tractor parts, signs, bottles, kitchen utensils, and my favorite finds: radios from the 1920s and ’30s
At the Miller farm, I snooped through the corn crib, milk house, barn and that abandoned workshop, with its uneven wooden floor, rusted and creaky door hinges and trove of old stuff
Some of these treasures made their way out of their dusty confines and into my room at home, such as the tall, sleek, tabletop Atwater Kent – with its wooden cabinet and glowing, hot vacuum tubes. It’s the radio my dad and his parents and sisters gathered around in the old farmhouse to hear their favorite radio dramas or a Cleveland baseball game
When more modern radios came along, the Atwater Kent was relegated to the barn, where Grandma and Grandpa could listen while milking cows by hand or feeding the horses. It was buried under straw and a few inches of dust when I found it. I cleaned up that elegant cabinet, dusted off the electronic guts of the old beast, plugged it in and listened to sweet music!
But that bell. That was a different kind of treasure, and I had so many questions
“Grandpa, where did that bell come from?” I asked him soon after finding it in about 1974
“The one in the weeds next to the shop.”
We took a walk from the house to the shop so he could refresh his memory, and he smiled when he saw it
“We got that out of the old schoolhouse where I went to school,” he said
“What? You stole the bell out of your school?!” I asked
“Nope. We took the whole building!” he said with a laugh
That’s when I learned that the lumber he and my great-grandfather used to build a second house on the farm came from that one-room schoolhouse – a salvage operation inspired by the Great Depression
With permission, my ancestors dismantled the school in the 1930s for lumber to build a home for my great-grandparents to live out their days while my grandparents raised my dad and his sisters in the original farmhouse
And they tossed the old bell behind the workshop and forgot about it until I stumbled upon it four decades later
It turns out, my questions led Grandpa to do something with it. As the nation’s Bicentennial approached in 1976, he dragged the bell out of the weeds, cleaned it up and painted it black. He built a red-brick pedestal for it in the yard and used dark-brown bricks to spell out the year
And on July 4, 1976, he rang the bell to celebrate the nation’s birth
Another mystery was revealed when I asked him why he built the pedestal in that spot, and it turns out that the inspiration to display the bell might have been more practical than patriotic
“There was a tree stump there, and building that pedestal around the stump was easier than digging it out,” he said with a smile
Thanks for the good stories, Grandpa. Fifty years later, we’ll think of you each time we ring that bell during this semiquincentennial year
Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers
youroldhouse1@gmail.com
@youroldhouse
