WOODSTOCK — Ken Hoyt will ring the Bryant Pond Baptist Church bell at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, signaling the start of interim Pastor Cal Fuller’s worship service.

Hoyt and others before him have rung the bell every Sunday back to April 8, 1906, the day after the 1850 Minot’s Ledge Lighthouse fog bell was dedicated at the church.

“It’s a wonderful piece of history we have and I’m glad to be a part of it,” Hoyt, 80, said Saturday.

“It’s a fascinating story, absolutely fascinating,” Fuller said of the bell’s history, which he learned after finding the bell’s clapper and an informational label in a church desk.

Lighthouse Digest, the Maine-based lighthouse news and history magazine, published a story about the bell in its current July/August edition, editor Tim Harrison said Friday in Whiting.

“For us lighthouse enthusiasts, this is a big story,” Harrison said.

“And I say it’s the most important bell in lighthouse history, and it could be one of the most important bells in American history, because it was on the first Minot’s tower, which was the first tower of its type built out in the ocean,” he said.

According to newspaper clippings in the church’s records, the bell that would toll two tragedies was originally cast at the Paul Revere Foundry in Boston.

It was cast by Henry N. Hooper and Co. bell founders. Hooper, one article reports, married a daughter of Paul Revere.

David Wadsworth, the historian of the Cohasset Historical Society in Cohasset, Mass., said Friday that the Boston Mariners Society pressed Congress for many years to install a warning at a group of ledges about 3 miles off Cohasset called the Cohasset Rocks.

In the Age of Sail, when wooden ships traveled the coast to Boston, the rocks “were a tremendous hazard” that caused many shipwrecks and loss of life, Wadsworth said.

After a local ship owner sent a list of the ships lost there, the government decided to build a lighthouse, he said.

Of two choices — an iron pile one that cost $39,000 or a stone light that cost $300,000 — they appropriated the $39,000.

“And no way was that light strong enough to withstand the storms out at the ledge,” Wadsworth said. “Right from the start, it was trouble.”

He said the huge waves crashed against and over the first lighthouse, which was 70 feet tall, and the second and current one, which is 114 feet tall.

This past winter, Wadsworth said he saw waves going over the current lighthouse during a nor’easter.

“The waves would climb up the outside on the east side,” he said. “They hit the shelving ledge and it makes them crash and go higher, and they were going over the light.”

The first Minot’s Ledge Lighthouse was built from 1847 to 1849 and first lighted on Jan. 1, 1850, Wadsworth said.

In late October 1850, the 640-pound Paul Revere Foundry bell was installed in the lighthouse. The bell cost $172.53 and its installation was $77.25, he said.

On April 16 and 17, 1851, a major blizzard struck Minot’s Ledge. The head keeper, John Bennett, had gone ashore to Boston to buy a new boat after the keeper’s boat was destroyed a few weeks earlier in a storm, Wadsworth said.

Trapped in the lighthouse were assistant keepers Joseph Wilson and Joseph Antoine. They perished when storm waves knocked the lighthouse into the icy sea, sending the bell to the ocean bottom.

Divers retrieved the bell, which was sold in a salvage auction in Boston in the late 1850s to Dwight Francis Faulkner, who owned the Faulkner Woolen Mill in Turner, Maine, Wadsworth said.

Congress then appropriated the $300,000 and the current lighthouse was built from Quincy granite. It was lighted in September 1860.

Faulkner had had the bell installed in a tower at the Turner woolen mill.

According to a newspaper article in the Bryant Pond church records, the bell tolled the town awake at 5:30 a.m. daily, sent them to breakfast at 6 a.m., and to work at 6:40 a.m.

By 1905, ownership of the mill had passed to Faulkner’s son, Francis T. Faulkner, Wadsworth said.

On Sunday, Sept. 3, 1905, Francis Faulkner walked to the mill to wind the clocks, saw that it was ablaze, and began ringing the bell, calling people from church to fight the fire, Wadsworth said.

Faulkner, who was wearing $3,000 worth of jewelry — including a Swiss watch, diamond studs on his shirt and a diamond ring — died in the fire.

When the tower burned, the bell broke and hit the ground. Its melted remains were recovered by Faulkner’s daughter, Anna Mont Chase, who had the bell recast by J. Osborne Faulkner, Wadsworth said.

Chase, who had connections in Bryant Pond, donated the bell to the church on April 4, 1906, Pastor Fuller said.

A dedication ceremony was held on Saturday, April 7, 1906.

A wealth of information about the bell and Minot’s Light can be found at the Cohasset Historical Society’s Maritime Museum, Wadsworth said.

Harrison said that although the facts had always been there, as time passed the story was eventually forgotten.

That is, until Pastor Fuller found the bell clapper, read the writing on the attached label identifying it as the Minot’s Light bell, and contacted Wadsworth and Harrison.

“It’s a pretty good story that’s been forgotten,” Harrison said. “It got swept away in the pages of time until Calvin Fuller found the thing in the church desk.”

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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