When a repair job in Virginia went sideways, leaving 10 historic church bells stranded, two determined churchwardens and an unexpected ally helped bring them back to Maine.
just now
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Viridian Law.
BAR HARBOR—For a year, the bells of St. Saviour’s Church were somewhere in Virginia, and nobody in Bar Harbor seemed able to get a straight answer about when they might come home.
They had been sent away for repairs, ten old bells that had hung above the Village Burying Ground for generations, ringing through wars and sickness and all the ordinary days that make up a town’s life. They were supposed to be back by the spring of 2025.
They were not.
The bells had become entangled in trouble at the foundry where they were being repaired, their fate caught up in the business of other people’s lives. Calls went unanswered. Emails went unanswered. Even registered letters, those solemn little envelopes that are supposed to make a person take notice, seemed to disappear into the silence.
Now, after a two year, multi-state journey, the ten bells of St. Saviour’s Church in Bar Harbor have come home.
Removed from their perch overlooking the Village Burying Ground on Wednesday, October 23, 2024, the refurbished bells were reinstalled Thursday, October 29, 2026.
The bells that have rung for decades, but had not rung for about two years prior to their removal in 2024 are scheduled to resume their ringing again on Friday, October 30.
When the bells were removed in 2024, they were sent to the Sunderlin Foundry in Ruther Glen, Virginia, for refurbishment and repairs to their fasteners. Parts that hang the bells had corroded over the years and the church had concerns about their safety in the future.
The original hope was that the bells would be refurbished and be reinstalled in the spring of 2025, but that did not happen. Apparently, the owners of the Sunderlin Foundry got divorced and the bells got caught in the middle of those proceedings.
The Sunderlin Foundry had begun to work on the bells and the church had begun to pay per contractual obligations. When the foundry stopped responding to communication attempts, phone calls, emails, and registered letters by the church, the church quit paying and eventually went on a quest to find out what was going on with the bells.
So, Senior Churchwarden Debbie Parlee and her husband, Junior Churchwarden Wayne Parlee took a road trip to Virginia. Churchwardens manage church property and buildings and grounds maintenance and the Parlees are dedicated to the church.
Debbie and Wayne drove to Virginia on two separate occasions in search of the bells, and according to Wayne, located them at the foundry sitting out in a field with some work having been done on them. They also found the foundry’s doors to be closed.
After many attempts to contact the owner using different phones because the first phone they were using apparently got blocked, they contacted a neighbor to the foundry as instructed by a note on the foundry’s door and the neighbor called the county sheriff. The sheriff, unfortunately, did not know how to get in contact with the foundry owner either.
According to St. Saviour’s the Rev. Canon Cricket Cooper, a blogger named Carl Zimmerman, who nobody at St. Saviour’s seems to know in person, and who runs the site towerbells.org, noticed that St. Saviour’s bells had been gone for an exceptionally long time and told some folks at McShane Bell Foundry in St. Louis, Missouri.
The people at McShane’s were familiar with the Virginia foundry, likely because there are very few bell foundries in the United States.
According to Rev. Canon Cooper, McShane’s contacted the church and with the assistance of an attorney representing the church, representatives from McShane’s went to Virginia, retrieved the church’s bells, took them to the McShane Bell Foundry, and finished the rehabilitation project.
While all of this was happening, the Parlees took a third trip. This time to St. Louis to make sure that the McShane Foundry was reputable.
Now the bells, along with their newly installed modern electronic ringing system, are back in Bar Harbor. They are perched upon their tower, after having been reinstalled by McShane’s Bell Foundry owner James Androuais and assistant Todd Graves, ready to peel out the sounds that only a set of 88-year-old cast bells can produce.
For a town that’s grown accustomed to their silence, it will likely be a grand sound to hear.
Some History of the Bells and Church
A beloved sound and piece of the island’s history, the bells at the Episcopal church have failed to ring for about four years now. According to a 1977 Ellsworth American note, they were given by William Pierson Hamilton in 1938 “for the recovery of his wife, Theodosia Sisson Hamilton, from a serious illness.”
It was the church complex’s last major addition. Hamilton was the great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton. The church was accepted into the National Registry of Historic Places in 1995.
The refurbishment of the bells, the rebuilding of the tower roof, and the installation of a new modern ringing system was expected to cost around $100,000. The campaign was made possible by a bequeathment from James Harris who was a seasonal Bar Harbor resident and church parishioner. Spencer and Rena Fulweiler also contributed significantly to the restoration of the bells.
Harris’ full-time residency was in Ann Arbor, Michigan and he was a University of Michigan professor of dentistry.
According to a piece in the Bentley Historical Library by Madeleine Bradford, “Early in his career as a U-M professor of dentistry, Dr. James E. Harris loved the music of the Burton Tower bells on Central Campus.”
At least some of Harris’ ashes are buried in the church’s memorial garden.
During World War I and World War II, the church’s parish halls transformed into Navy barracks. It hosted the Most Reverend Randall Davidson in 1905. He was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to celebrate the Eucharist in America. The 10 bells in their green tower (the carillon) didn’t witness every event, but they witnessed many.
The church was built over multiple campaigns beginning in the late 1870s. It’s American shingle style uses both stone and wood to house a cruciform church and a rectory. It has also housed Maine’s largest collection of Tiffany windows. In the late 1980s, thieves stole a Tiffany Lily window that had been located in the back of the church.
“Traditionally, stained glass was used to commemorate and memorialize important families, and those windows commemorate community leaders in Bar Harbor. Some of these windows are by Louis Comfort Tiffany, showing Bar Harbor’s connection to early 20th century influential artists,” said Bar Harbor Historical Society Executive Director Erin Cough.
Some of the windows are dedicated to people of Bar Harbor: Clarence Little, founding director of JAX and Samuel Lyon, the first president of the Bar Harbor Water Company. Another window denotes the deaths of Joel Howard Reed and Fannie Milliken, who died in a canoe.
The church’s website reads, “St. Saviour’s contains 43 memorial windows by British, German, French, and American artists. These span more than a century (1886-1992) of glass design, and commemorate family, loved ones, saints, and local personalities.”
Links to Learn More
We’ve updated the story at 5:22 p.m., October 29 to include additional information about the history of philanthropy for the bells.
Bar Harbor’s Historic Bells Came Down Today
All photos and video by Shaun Farrar/Bar Harbor Story.
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