Ironman Brings Home Bronze

Alan Earls Editor

Above, DPW’s Brennan Sankey takes his turn at hefting the town's 200+ pound antique bronze bell, here carrying it into the Franklin Historical Museum on his shoulder.

Wednesday shortly after noon, a team from the Franklin DPW carefully and successfully extracted an old and very historic bronze bell from the steeple of the former South Congregational Church on Washington Street, owned by the town since the early 1970s.

The structure was the first location of the town’s historical museum until around 2010 when the museum relocated to the former town hall at 80 West Central Street and since then the church building has been unused and vacant. It is now in the final stages of formal transfer to Habitat for Humanity, the non-profit that will convert it into an affordable single-family home, while maintaining key aspects of the historical, 1858 structure and facade in perpetuity.

But one of the impediments to that plan has been the bell, tricky to remove but simply in the way of the team hoping to rehab the structure and make it habitable.

That’s where the DPW came in. At the request of the Franklin Historical Commission, DPW Director Robert ‘Brutus’ Cantoreggi brought several of his team members to explore the narrow stairway to the belfry and to assess how best to get it down. After some mutual consultation, a team of three, Peter Freitas, Sewer Foreman, Jeremy Gardner, Water Foreman, and Brennan Sankey, a member of the Sewer Department team, got to work.

In less than half an hour they had the bell unbolted from its mounting and carefully carried down two flights of narrow stairs, in relays., eventually carefully placing it in a pick up truck bed for a short ride to the museum. There it was welcomed by a member of the Historical Commission and by museum archivist Rowan Lowell.

Brennan Sankey and Jeremy Gardner lower the bell from Sankey's shoulders

Lowell quickly probed past the decades of dirt to find the initials GHH, Mass. and the date 1837.

And that, according to Reference Librarian Vicki Earls, marks it as a product of the Holbrook Bell Company of East Medway (which later became Millis). The company’s founder, Major George Holbrook (1767-1846) was born in Wrentham and in his youth was apprenticed to Paul Revere. Around 1819 he set up his bell business in East Medway which prospered for decades, shipping bells across the region and across the continent.

The bell, according to Earls, originally belonged to the first Franklin High School, the Franklin Academy, established by Mortimer Blake in the late 1830s. What became of the bell after the closure of Blake’s academy was a bit of a mystery. Written records only provided two pieces of information: it was a Holbrook bell and it was moved to the Congregational Church (now the Federated Church), which has always been adjacent to the Common. But there is a larger and much newer bell there today.

That the bell is a Holbrook and dates to 1837 now make it is clear that it went to the Congregational Church – the SOUTH Congregational Church.

And after some cleaning, its future should be brighter, with the Historical Commission exploring options for keeping the bell as a meaningful and usable symbol of the town’s history and a reminder of our very first high school.