The Branch County bell that was saved twice

The bell that rings over downtown Coldwater is older than the tower it hangs in, and that gap is the whole story.

It first went up in 1887, in the corner tower of Branch County’s new High Victorian courthouse — a 3,500-pound bell cast by the C. H. Meneely Company of Troy, New York, paired with a clock movement from the E. Howard Company of Boston. For most of a century it marked the hours over the square, the kind of sound you stop noticing because it has always been there.

Then in 1972 someone set the courthouse on fire. The arson gutted the building, but crews got the old bell and the clock out before the tower came down. That could easily have been the end of both — salvaged, then quietly junked. Instead a committee of local people went around to neighbors and businesses raising money to give the pair a home of their own. They built a new freestanding clock tower on the southwest corner of the grounds, fitted the original Meneely bell and Howard clock back inside, and dedicated it on July 30, 1988.

So you get this slightly mismatched thing: 1980s brickwork wrapped around 1880s machinery. Look at the tower and your eye says it is newer than it is. Listen to the bell and you are hearing the exact one that rang the first time in 1887 — the same bronze, recast nothing, just moved. A town that lost its courthouse to a deliberate fire decided the one piece it would not lose was the voice on top of it.