CSU’s long-lost bell has been returned
It was stolen half a century before Old Main burned in 1970
Almost 100 years after a bell that hung at Colorado State University’s Old Main was stolen, the nearly 500pound piece of history is back on the Fort Collins campus, and will soon peal from a tower in the new Alumni Center.
“Honestly, the story of the bell really blew our minds,” Associated Students of Colorado State University president Daniela Pineda Soracá said in a CSU news release. “We really thought the original bell had been melted down for scrap during World War II.”
CSU acquired the bell, which was manufactured in 1894, sometime around 1910, and hung it in the tower of Old Main.
The chiming of the bell announced the start of classes, and beginning around 1915, was rung after every football victory. When the clapper was later stolen, students continued to ring it by pounding it with sledge hammers.
By 1919, repeated hammer blows had cracked the bell. One night a group of at least four students climbed the tower, brought the bell down and slipped away unseen.
Frightened they would be found out, they took it to a nearby farm owned by one of the thieves and buried it.
When the farm where the bell was entombed was put up for sale, they dug the artifact up, and moved it to an off-campus fraternity house where it was kept for a number of years.
“The story of the bell was passed down through the fraternity from year to year,” a man identified in a CSU release only as John, said. His fraternity was involved in the theft and members who knew the story were determined to keep it safe.
By the early 1970s, most people had forgotten the bell.
Eventually, it was moved again. “It crossed state lines,” Kristi Bohlender, executive director of the CSU Alumni Association told CSU’s student newspaper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian.
When plans for the Iris & Michael Smith Alumni Center were announced, the fraternity secret-keepers decided the time was right to return it.
In the spring of 2016, Bohlender received a call from a lawyer who asked what the university would do with the Old Main bell if was returned.
A few days later, Bohlender’s husband called her from home while she was driving one of their children to basketball practice, she told the Collegian. “He said, ‘Um, there’s a bell in our driveway,’ and that’s how we got it back.”
The ASCSU agreed to have the bell restored, a project that took months. It was repaired and polished, and the yoke was replaced.
A German company cast a new clapper, and the bell arrived back on campus in late March.
Old Main had burned down in 1970, and no building near the site of its original home could accommodate the bell.
But the bell could be included in a tower of the Iris & Michael Smith Alumni Center, on the northeast corner of the new on-campus football stadium.
The tower will be named for University donors Jim and Nadine Henry, who were honored as “Alumni of the Century” in 2000.
“My dad died in 2006, and my mom in 2015, and the family has been looking for a way to honor them,” Kathleen Henry, a daughter of the Henrys and CEO of the CSU Foundation.
She and her three siblings said their parents would be thrilled to know their name will be forever connected with the bell.
“CSU was their passion, they made the best friends of their lives here,” Henry said. “They always said their lives were forever changed for the better by this university.”
Students will be allowed to use the bell, which will be rung electronically, starting next year.
“Hearing the sound of this bell will bring a sense of pride and connect us to the roots of our land-grant university,” Pineda Soracá said.