The Bell to the Top of the Church

By Samuel Lee Smith

How the bell reached the top of the Scotchtown Presbyterian Church, as I remember it.

The bell came from the Presbyterian Church in Mongaup Valley [Sullivan County]. The bell was so heavy that it shook the whole church as it was rung. The structure was not strong enough to support that heavy a bell. It was during the month of May 1932 that the removal of the bell from the Mongaup Valley Church took place. I was still in school, when my father, Samuel Slaughter Smith, our neighbor James Norris and Charles Alexander Comfort, made several trips to Mongaup Valley to remove the bell from the top of that church.

One Saturday, my brother Richard Eugene Smith and myself accompanied the men to Mongaup Valley and loaded the bell on Mr. Comfort’s model TT Ford flat bed Truck. The bell was then driven back to Mr. Comfort’s farm, where it remained on the truck until we prepared the Scotchtown Presbyterian Church for the trip to the top of the steeple.

By this time it was the month of June 1932 and school was recessed for the summer. My grandfather, Abraham Abram Galloway, was a carpenter and painter. He helped all of us remove the boards of the ceiling on the front porch of the church, also some support beams that were in the path of the bell on the way up to the steeple.

My father had a large diameter rope, that we used to pull the large hay fork up to the track in the top of the barn and back in the mow. This rope was supported by large wooden pulleys in cast iron frames. This rope was used to unload the bell from the truck and lifting the bell to the top of the church.

When all the preparations had been made for the bell’s lifting to the top of the church, Mr. Comfort’s flat bed truck was backed up to the stone porch of the church. The bell was slid off the truck on to the porch on planks. Since the bell was very heavy, the rope and pulley were used to accomplish this. The pulley was fastened to one end of a long rope and the other end of the rope was fastened to a large beam in the pulpit area of the church. Another rope was attached to the bell and then threaded through the pulley and back to the pickup truck, which was used as the source of power for moving the bell.

After the bell reached the porch area under the opening in the ceiling, the long rope was attached to the top of the steeple structure, then down through a pulley, which was fastened to the top of the bell and back up to the top of the steeple through another pulley and then down through the pulley that was used in sliding the bell off the truck. The rope then extended out to the pickup truck.

The bell was then raised to the balcony area where it was braced and supported for its stay overnight. The next day it was lifted to the top of the steeple and supported in its present position. During the following days, the timbers were replaced and secured in their original place. The porch ceiling boards were replaced and painted by my grandfather.

This whole procedure took about a month to accomplish, since we were all dairy farmers and could only work a few hours a day away from home.

I was born on March 22, 1917 and at this time I was 15 years old. The minister of the Scotchtown Presbyterian Church during this time was the Rev. Dr. Alexander James Kerr, who graduated from Princeton University in 1879.