Read time: 4 min.

Back in 2019, I was partially responsible for curating an exhibit about Delaware County’s 1887 courthouse for the historical society. I searched far and wide for artifacts left over from the long-demolished structure and found statues, fenceposts, rubble, and finally, the old courthouse bell! It seemed pretty puny for a 165-foot-tall structure as magnificent as our courthouse was! Further research told me that it only weighed a thousand pounds¹. I wondered why.

Don’t get me wrong- most thousand-pound objects are pretty hefty. Unfortunately, it’s all relative. Tipton County’s courthouse bell clocks in a 3,000. It’s eight feet tall²! The bell of the Jefferson County Courthouse in Madison -built before the Civil War- weighs in at 3,100³.

Lafayette’s courthouse bell takes the cake at a whopping 3,300 pounds⁴, while smaller communities like Winchester and Crawfordsville check in at 1,500 and 1,200 pounds each. 

I don’t have a weight for it, but Franklin County’s courthouse in Brookville is seven feet tall and six feet wide, while Bartholomew County’s is six inches thick. Even the bell of the 1880 Muncie High School building’s 120-foot-tall clock tower was double the weight of the bell in our old courthouse⁵. What gives? 

I eventually found the answer. The bell from the 1887 courthouse was not new when the building was built. In fact, it was reused from its 1837 predecessor! In 1848, the bell we see today was cast and brought by a teamster, Simon Conn, from Cincinnati’s Buckeye Bell Foundry. The original courthouse bell was moved to the Muncie Seminary Building at the southwest corner of West Jackson and South Gharkey Street. That building no longer stands.

When the 1837 courthouse was torn down to make way for its replacement, the bell was saved to be reinstalled in the 165-foot clock tower of the new structure. Unfortunately, things are a little funny in Muncie these days. The County Building replaced our landmark courthouse in 1967, and the Justice Center replaced it in 1992. A couple years ago, the former Wilson Middle School was repurposed into the Delaware County Justice and Rehabilitation Center. The former Justice Center is now home to condominiums. 

Things are backwards! Our school is a jail, and our jail is a series of homes. The County Building still serves a governmental purpose, but there’s nowhere to ring a bell. None of the three buildings feature a tower, cupola, or dome.

Aside from a handful of churches with bells of their own, there’s no great place to hang a bell in Muncie today. Lincoln Elementary’s sixty-foot spire bit the dust in 1921, and Garfield’s eighty-foot tower was torn down in 1978⁶. Last time I drove past, Delaware County’s 176-year-old courthouse bell was still sitting in front of “Justice Lofts.” That seems like a shame for such a storied, if small, piece of Delaware County history. Other remnants from the old courthouse have been preserved with care. The bell should be too!

Sources Cited
1 Shaffer, Pat (1944, July 17). Courthouse Bell, Once Pride of County, Now Is Unused. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 3. 
2 National Register of Historic Places, Tipton County Courthouse, Tipton, Tipton County, Indiana, National Register #84001665).
3 Old Courthouse Treasure (2021, August 26). The Historical Marker Database. Web. Retrieved July 6, 2024.
4 Counts, Will; Jon Dilts (1991). The 92 Magnificent Indiana Courthouses. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Print.
5 Kramer, S. (1977, May 14). Pupils eager as Sutton, Garfield additions near finish. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 13.
6 (See footnote 5).