Revere foundry bell finds its way home from California

A bronze bell cast in 1834 in Paul Revere’s Massachusetts foundry is coming home — capping a nearly two-century, cross-country odyssey that saw hauled by oxcart to churches in Ohio before languishing for decades in a California garage.

After a weeklong journey across the U.S., the historic bell was returned Friday to the site where it was created 188 years ago, said Kiley Nichols, a spokesperson for the Paul Revere Heritage Site in Canton, just south of Boston.

In 1984, real estate agent Jeannene Shanks became the bell’s accidental owner. She’d helped broker the sale of what once was First Congregational Church in Vermilion, Ohio, to a fitness center — but the gym didn’t want the heavy bell, and Shanks didn’t feel good about it being scrapped. She made a $1,000 donation to the church in exchange for the bell, which earlier had adorned the belfry of the First Presbyterian Church of Cleveland.

When Shanks and her husband, Robert, retired in Chino Hills, California, they hauled the bell with them.

“It became the joke of the family,”said Shanks’daughter, Amy Miller, 66, a psychologist in Chino Hills.“they’d open the doors to the garage and ring the bell every Fourth of July. People would look at it and say, ‘What the heck is that?’”

After their parents’ deaths, Miller and her 69-year-old brother moved the bell to Miller’s garage, where it’s sat since 2009.

Miller did some online sleuthing, figured out where the bell was forged and decided to donate it to the Massachusetts museum so the public could view and appreciate it.