For most of its life, the old bell had one job: call people to church.
For decades, its sound carried across the grounds of Bethel Academy near Arpin, Wisconsin, summoning students from the Adventist boarding school to worship. Even after the academy moved to Columbus in 1949 and became Wisconsin Academy, the bell remained at the church and continued ringing on Sabbath mornings.
Then, a few years ago, it nearly lost its voice.
Membership at the old Bethel church had dwindled and the Wisconsin Conference decided to sell the building. Terry Howard, a 1972 Wisconsin Academy graduate who grew up nearby, immediately thought about the bell.
“I don’t know who’s going to buy this church, and that bell has a lot of history to it,” Howard remembers thinking. With permission from the conference, he and his son-in-law removed it before the sale.
Howard wasn’t sure what should happen next. He just knew what shouldn’t.
“Initially it was to protect it really,” he said. “I didn’t know what I would do with it, but I knew that I didn’t want it to go to just ABC Church or ABC New Use.”
The connection was personal. Howard’s parents had attended Bethel Academy. He grew up in a home built on the foundation of its former boys’ dormitory, and as a child he heard that same bell ring at 9 a.m. on Sabbath mornings. He met his future wife at the grade school connected to the church, and they later attended Wisconsin Academy together.
To Howard, the bell had always meant more than keeping time.
“The bell is almost like a directive,” he said. “It directs you to the church. It directs you to worship God.”
So he stored it at his home.
And waited.
Some time later, Wisconsin Academy was preparing to mark 75 years in Columbus, Howard called Wisconsin Conference President Titus Naftanaila.
“Pastor, I got a crazy idea,” Howard told him.
His proposal: Howard would donate the bell if the school promised to build a tower so it could continue ringing for students.
Naftanaila’s response? “That’s a wonderful idea. If you come up with any other crazy ideas, you just let me know what they are.”
What Howard did not know was that another conversation had taken place at Wisconsin Academy just weeks earlier.
Maintenance Director Dan Cunningham and Bible teacher Greg Edge had been talking about how nice it would be to have a bell on campus. Nothing elaborate, Cunningham said. Maybe a 10-inch bell students could ring during school celebrations.
They talked about it, realized there wasn’t money for it and moved on.
Then came word that Howard had a bell.
Not 10 inches.
Thirty-four inches. Cast iron. Somewhere between 600 and 800 pounds. Cunningham estimates, based on its design and manufacturer, that it dates to about 1903. “The timing was kind of providential,” Cunningham said.
For a maintenance director accustomed to facing repairs with limited resources, the timing fit a pattern he had already seen on campus. A need appears. There is no obvious solution. Then somehow a donation arrives or someone offers help.
“I don’t see how it would’ve otherwise,” Cunningham said of the bell. “We turn around within a matter of a couple weeks and we have a bell that has significance to the school.”
Now the bell is getting a permanent home.
Students have helped with the bell tower, and the Class of 2026 made completing it part of its class gift. Its brickwork even marks the transition from Bethel to Wisconsin Academy, with the 49th and 50th rows laid differently to recognize the move to Columbus and the school’s first graduating class there.
The bell itself remains covered in the patina of age. Howard hopes it stays that way.
“If you leave that patina on, it will not hurt the sound of the bell,” he said, “but yet it will show that this bell has been around.”
Perhaps no one demonstrated that connection more vividly than Patricia Bunker, a member of Bethel Academy’s Class of 1949. When she returned for Alumni Weekend, she was invited to ring the bell once again. She did so vigorously.
Today, graduates walk beneath the bell after commencement and ring it before gathering for their final class prayer. It also sounds during alumni gatherings.
Those traditions arrive as Wisconsin Academy is seeing enrollment climb from about 60 students in recent years to more than 90 today. Principal Derek Timms says students are also beginning to see the academy as something they have a part in building.
“They’re starting to get it that this is their school,” he said.
Howard, a Christian musician, sees something fitting in an instrument finding its voice again.
“It’s a missionary, if you will,” he said, “calling these young people to church.”
More than 125 years after Adventist secondary education began at Bethel, the campus has changed and generations of students have moved on. But the old bell has returned to the school whose story it helped begin.
And it is still calling.
Debbie Michel is editor of the Lake Union Herald.