The Boston Manufacturing Company Bell

This was the second and last known bell in the cupola of the Boston Manufacturing Company's original building

In 1814, the Boston Manufacturing Company acquired a bell from Paul Revere’s North End iron foundry.

Placed in the belfry of New England’s first fully-integrated textile factory, this bell routinized nearly every hour of the mill girl’s day, from getting up at 4:30 to the commencement of work at 5:00 and on. Switching from sun time and its more informal ordering of daily work and leisure on the farm to clock time posed a real challenge for these former Yankee farm girls. If a mill girl arrived at the factory just a minute late, she was sent home and lost her wages for the day or was fired. 

While the bell symbolized the birth of industry and the rise of efficiency in the workplace, it also represented the decline of nature, the sun, and the seasons ordering the everyday rhythms of life.

Women were vocal about what they viewed as the tyranny of the bell.

‘The factory bell begins to ring,
And we must all obey,
And to our old employment go,
Or else be turned away’

That early Paul Revere Bell cracked in the 1850s. It was replaced by a new bell manufactured by the Boston foundry, Henry N. Hooper and Co.

Hooper, once an apprentice to Revere, had purchased his foundry and made a name for the company producing bells and a diverse array of items from decorative lighting fixtures to Civil War artillery for the Union Army. The latter are still on display in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The Hooper Bell commissioned for the factory was eventually removed and recommissioned as a church bell in Nova Scotia. 

In 1987, as the Charles River Museum was readying to open, a request was made for the return of the bell to the Museum, where it has remained on display ever since.

Photo: Bill Edmunds 9/8/87