From the Morgue: General Baptists preserve old bell

I've written about bells before in my blog. One such article reflected on the silencing of the bells of St. Mary's Cathedral in 1988. An earlier blog tracked the bell that formerly hung at Saint Francis Hospital when it was located on Good Hope Street.

This blog traces the history of a former riverboat bell that became a church bell.

Published July 12, 1974, in the Southeast Missourian:

Old church bell moves again

By JUDITH ANN CROW

Missourian Staff Writer

From a foundry in Pittsburgh to a steamboat to a “steamboat graveyard” in the Mississippi River to three church belfries in Cape Girardeau — the old bell has traveled a long way in its 134 years.

Sunday, it will be displayed on a wooden frame (built by Verle C. Watkins, a church member) during the dedication of its new home — the First General Baptist Church’s new house of worship at 1812 Cape LaCroix Road. Then, it will be stored again until its permanent installation.

Marked “A. Fulton, No. 70, Pittsburgh, 1840,” the bell has been part of Cape Girardeau's history for nearly all those 134 years.

At the ceremony Sunday, Mrs. O. Louis Wilcox, the former Miss Ellen Wilson, will sketch the bell’s history. Mrs. Wilcox and her sister, Miss Mary Wilson, both former schoolteachers, are great granddaughters of Col. G.W. Juden, Cape Girardeau’s second mayor, who was responsible for reclaiming the (bell from a “steamboat) graveyard,” a snag-filled area in the bend of the river just south of Cape Girardeau.

As related by Mrs. Wilcox’ great uncle, the Rev. J.C. Maple, a Baptist minister who came to Cape Girardeau in 1857, Col. Juden was a friend of the captain of the steamboat Julius, which had sunk. The captain agreed that Col. Juden could have the bell for the Baptist church if he could retrieve it from the wreckage.

Mr. Maple learned the story from his wife, Sarah Ellen Juden, who remembered the time in the early 1840s, when she, then about age 5, and her older sister, Ann Eliza, about 9, went out into the river in a large rowboat with their father and two of his (Black) slaves, who took the bell from the wreck while the river was low and the hulk exposed.

Soon the bell was suspended in the cupola of the church which had been built in 1839 on the west side of Lorimier Street, north of Independence Street opposite and a little south of the Public Library building. Crumbled remnants of the building, which collapsed Oct. 24, 1919, are still discernible.

Erected in 1839, that old house of worship served the Missionary Baptists until 1893, when they moved to the new church at the northwest corner of Broadway and Spanish Street; when the congregation moved, the Julius’ fine old brass bell went with it.

But when the First Baptist Church built its new edifice at 926 Broadway in 1928, it left the bell in the gracefully steepled belfry in the 1893 church, sold to the General Baptists, where it continued to call Cape Girardeans to worship until May 1973, when the General Baptist congregation sold the building to the Free Will Baptist Home Mission board.

Four church members — Bill Reiker, Hess Reddick, Charles Tucker and Leon Wiggs — climbed into the tower and brought down the bell, which weighs about 200 pounds. Since that time it has been stored in the basement of the Wiggs home, Mr. Wiggs being the president of the First General Baptist Church board of directors.

Young Steven Wiggs cleaned and polished the bell as a Boy Scout project, and the congregation has plans to construct twin brick towers in front of the new church on Cape LaCroix Road from which to suspend it.