300-year-old Gabriel has historic ring in Ellicottville
ELLICOTTVILLE — The mighty bell of St. John’s Episcopal Church heralds the 11 o’clock service on Sunday mornings with 11 tolls.
It sometimes amounts to one chime for every parishioner in attendance.
St. John’s has 14 members, not all of whom make it to liturgy each week. Most are over age 60, and a few are in their 80s. The parish priest is 88.
Nevertheless, the 1,300-pound bell named Gabriel never fails to announce that they’re still around.
“We won’t start service until the Gabriel has rung,” said Hilde Ridenour, church treasurer.
The bell was cast in Spain in 1708. Its captivating history reads like something out of a Dumas novel and includes a bit part in the Carlist uprising in Spain during the 1830s, according to church records and a history of Cattaraugus County.
In celebrating the bell’s 300th birthday this year, church members have been trying to determine if Gabriel — so named because of an inscribed reference to the biblical angel that visited Mary — is the oldest functioning large bell in the country.
Bells contending for the distinction have surfaced in a variety of locations, but it’s difficult to determine which might be the oldest in the country.
“Bells can move around, and sometimes their movements are fairly well documented, and sometimes they’re not,” said Carl S. Zimmerman, a St. Louis campanologist who operates Web sites on tower bells and church bells. “Quite a lot of old bells were cast for the place they now hang, but there are bells that got to their current places by rather devious routes.”
McKendree University in Illinois claims to have a Spanish bell from the eighth century in its chapel belfry, although the bell was recast in 1858.
The bell in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in St. Louis that arrived from England in 1960 dates back to 1636. It’s much smaller than Gabriel, was badly cracked and welded, and isn’t used much now.
The San Jose Bell at El San Miguel Mission in Santa Fe, N.M., reads either 1856 or 1356, making it old, or really, really old.
And in East Haddam, Conn., residents trumpet a bell said to have been cast in 815. The bell is believed to have hung for years in a Spanish mission that was raided in the Napoleonic Wars. It then traversed the Atlantic as ballast and ended up at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, which was built in 1890.
But, alas, there’s also debate about the East Haddam bell’s origins.
“There are people who say it’s not that old, it’s a recasting,” said town historian Karl Stofko. “There are so many different stories that have been written about it. We always give it the benefit of the doubt here.”
Gabriel seems to have followed a path similar to the East Haddam bell, or vice versa.
Gabriel was, according to the church and county histories, made for a Catholic monastery on the outskirts of Malaga, Spain, where for 127 years it faithfully rang the Angelus — a pattern of three strokes, three times, followed by nine strokes in succession — at morning, noon and evening.
In 1835, Don Carlos and some of his followers took refuge in the monastery during his attempt to usurp the throne from Isabella II after the death of her father, Ferdinand VII, according to a history of St. John’s by William King Laidlaw. Don Carlos opposed his brother’s repeal of the law that prevented succession to the throne by a woman.
Gabriel was used as an alarm bell when liberal supporters of Ferdinand sacked the monastery, and Don Carlos fled to France.
Legend has it that a monk ringing Gabriel was still grasping the rope when the attackers rushed in and killed him.
The monastery was destroyed, and Gabriel and other bells were taken from the ruins and sold to a sea captain from New York City for use as ballast, according to a history of Cattaraugus County, written in 1879.
Utica financier Nicholas Devereux, one of the founders of St. Bonaventure University, purchased the bell in New York City in 1837, knowing the Episcopal church in Ellicottville was being constructed, Laidlaw wrote.
Devereux sold Gabriel to the congregation for $125 on the condition it be rung three times a day, marking time at 6 a.m., noon and 9 p.m. It was hauled via the Erie Canal, then on land by horse, and raised by a team of oxen into the tower of the church, which was completed in 1838.
A glimpse of Gabriel requires some acrobatic climbing along a series of wooden ladders, through a cubby hole and into a tower fortified by large beams.
The patinaed bell, 7 feet in circumference at its base and nearly 3 feet tall, hangs gracefully from a rust-encrusted cast-iron yoke.
The inscription reads in capital letters, “Abe Soi Labos Del Angel Que En Alto Suena Maria Gracia Plena.”
It translates into, “Hail, I am the voice of the angel who on high sounds forth, Mary! Full of grace.” Beneath is a line that identifies “Bargas” as the bell maker in Malaga in 1708.
St. John’s, which has the oldest church building in Cattaraugus County, has never been a large congregation. At its peak in the 1950s, it had about 55 members. It is now the smallest congregation in the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York and seemingly shrinking.
Margery Fitzpatrick said her great-great-great-grandfather helped found the church.
“I feel I should do everything I can to keep this going in one way or another,” she said. “I don’t want an old flame to die.”
The Rev. Victoria Duncan doesn’t expect that to happen. Duncan works with many Episcopal churches in her role as canon for the development of mission and ministry and said she believes St. John’s may be ripe for a renaissance.
“They have a tenacity in that congregation,” she said.
