DOWAGIAC — A local church has given its bell a new lease on life after discovering its historic origins.

After years of silence, the ringing of church bells emanating from Dowagiac First United Methodist Church can now be heard every Sunday. The congregation recently discovered that the bell was forged in 1864 during the Civil War by Meneely Foundry in West Troy, New York. 

“My wife, Liz deserves the credit for seeing some of the writing on the bell that I couldn’t see,” said Dowagiac FUMC Pastor Christopher Momany. “She said ‘it looks like it’s from 1864,’ in the middle of the Civil War. We started to figure out the writing on the bell and looked up the Meneely Foundry. They made some of the best bells in the country.” 

This same well-known foundry forged a special bell in 1893 for the world’s fair in Chicago. The Chicago bell was made from old chains left over after the days of slavery, transforming injustice into a new “Liberty Bell.” 

“The idea was to take a horrible thing and then transform it into something promising,” he said. 

The church’s 1864 bell is now being used again to call people to worship on Sundays. Church member Gary Carlile recently landscaped around the bell to give it new life.

According to Momany, the bell had been used sparingly since the church moved to its current location in the 1970s. The church’s discovery of the bell’s origins took on new meaning when he remembered the church participated in the United States National Park Service’s “Day of Healing” event in 2019 to remember the landing of the first enslaved Africans in English-occupied North America in 1619 at Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia, now part of Fort Monroe National Monument, a unit of the National Park System.
Fort Monroe National Monument and its partners invited parks and community organizations across the country to come together in solidarity to ring bells simultaneously for four minutes – one for each century – to remember the first Africans who were brought in bondage to American shores in 1619 and to honor 400 years of African American history.

“We had no idea what the bell was about at the time,” Momany said. “We hardly rang it for the next six years.”

Momany said the ringing of the bell has been well-received by the community.

“It’s loud,” he said. “People come in and say ‘it’s been a long time since I’ve heard something like that.’ I went to the all-church council meeting after Easter and said ‘I think it was kind cool we did that on Easter, maybe we’ll do it on special Sundays?’ They said ‘Why don’t we do it every Sunday?’ That’s okay with me.”

For Momany, the bell links to the church’s own abolitionist tradition that the congregation looks forward to continuing for years to come.

“It means that freedom is alive today,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of challenges and a lot of problems in our world and in our nation but this is a tradition of freedom. It speaks to today, so there’s something powerful about that. It calls people to worship but secondly, it also stands for freedom.”