“Like a setting of opal and gold”

By Michael Kelly

Whether in the garden admiring your horticultural handiwork, exiting the library with an armload of books or entering your car at the post office, you may suddenly hear a comforting sound trickling out of the sky reminding you of just where you are. After being silent for some three years, the historic chimes of the Church of Christ Congregational on Norfolk’s Village Green are pealing daily again from 6 a.m. until midnight.

Every quarter hour the newly refurbished chimes measure time in incremental four-note nuggets of sound before culminating on the hour in rich, sonorous bongs. Robbins Battell, advisor to Abraham Lincoln, prosperous businessman and Norfolk benefactor, who was born and died at Whitehouse, was also an accomplished musician. A composer of hymns (“Abide with Me”) and spirituals, Battell was an expert on campanology, the study of bells, their casting, tuning and sounding.

He wrote a simple melody for church chimes that would remind people of the glory of God and mark the passage of time on this mortal coil. Battell generously donated chimes to several colleges including Yale University and Williams College in New England, and Beloit College in Wisconsin. His chimes in the Battell Chapel at Yale inspired Charles Ives to compose the “The Bells of Yale” in 1897.

For his beloved congregational church in Norfolk, Battell, in 1879, commissioned Meneely & Kimberly, Co. of Troy, New York to cast a 2,025-lb. bronze bell. From the Blake Bell Foundry of Boston, he ordered five custom hanging bells, weighing 1,100, 400, 300, 250 and 125-lbs., respectively. Mounted in the belfry of the church, the bells melodiously marked time in the village for decades and summoned parishioners to Sunday services and church celebrations.

The Reverend Erick Olsen, pastor of Church of Christ since 2002, was disheartened a few years ago when the mechanism of the church bells broke down after 135 years of wear and tear. Townspeople of all religious denominations informed him of how much they missed the reassuring, faithful tolling of the church bells. Instead of initiating a public fund raising campaign, Reverend Olsen and the congregation’s leadership embarked on a mission to attain the necessary restoration funds (approximately $30,000) from church resources as a gift from the church to the town.

The church’s leadership hired the Verdin Company of Cincinnati, Ohio (which has been making and restoring bronze bells since 1842) to update and modernize the workings of the bell tower. Local contractor Dan Green reinforced or replaced existing beams and, since one of the five hanging bells had come loose, installed all new long bell supports. The yoke for the big bell had to be braced and strengthened and the worn striker hammers were removed and replaced with a new VO (6) Bell Striker Unit custom designed and positioned to precisely strike the exterior of the stationary bells by means of an electromagnetic pulse.

A Verdin DBC 870 Bell Controller, a micro-processor embedded in an electronic keypad controls the operation of the bells in tandem with a synchronized crystal controlled clock with a digital time-based memory. An easy-to-use, 20-character touch pad was installed alongside the organ in the choir from which Elizabeth Allyn, the church’s minister of music, can now easily program a multitude of customized chimes suitable for every occasion.

The chimes are often shredded by the wind and transported to surprising nooks and recesses of the town. One couple that recently moved from the outskirts of town into the village said that the church bells remind them of visits to old European villages, engendering in them an ongoing rapport with Norfolk’s past and reminding them aurally that they are not alone in this world. A writer who recently moved to a house near the green has said that the bells make her feel like she’s on a college campus, a sentiment that most certainly would have made Robbins Battell proud.

As Ella Antoinette Hotchkiss expressed it in the second stanza of her 19th century poem, “Norfolk Chimes,” “First in the day came the sweetness surprising, Ears, then alert, caught the meaning to hold; Oft has the spirit within felt uprising While the fair hours and moments were told, Each like a setting of opal and gold, Chime! chime! chime! chime!”

Photo of one of the new electro-magnetic strikers in the Congregational Church’s belltower by Erick Olsen.