The Bell

Cast iron Bell,  probably weighs in the 600-800 lb range.  I remember it from when I was a kid sitting in the front yard at my grandmothers atop a huge tower.

here is what my dad tells me about the bell

"Big daddy bought the bell from a church and had it moved to his house in Judson in Gregg County.  Your Mother says it was toward the back and beside the driveway which ran between it and the house.  It was mounted on four tall pipes with welded bracing.  It sat there until he died in 1961.  Papa moved it from Judson to Starrville by digging up the ends of the pipe and tilting the entire structure and bell onto the back of a flatbed truck.  Once at Starrville, it was placed in front of the house firmly mounted in concrete filled holes.  After Mama died in 1984, some friends moved it to the house on Richmond Road for us.  By that time so much rainwater had run down inside the open pipe legs that they had rusted off at ground level.  They simply rocked it loose.  Once in Tyler they had a problem getting it upright so it wasnt exactly where we had planned.  The legs were in the ground a little and we put a raised bed around it for flowers.  When we moved to Camden Drive we had it un bolted from its platform atop the tower and placed it on concrete blocks in the flower bed.  We did the same with it when we moved to Wisdom creek until we had the landscaping done and then we had a structure built for it."

My parents hired movers to move the thing from their house to ours and as you can see it took some work for them to do it

Now that bell is in our back yard, resting on concrete blocks as it waits for us to built a simple structure for it to rest for the next 20 years or so on.  I hope it will be happy here for many years to come and someday we can pass it down to our son.

DD