The antiquated dinner bell is a time-honored reminder of delicious home-cooked meals. But, like many another sound once so familiar, it is seldom heard nowadays.
For dinner bells and farm bells have gone the way of the cow-horn trumpet and the conch-shell horn.
The only places I know where they are still rung as a summons to dinner are The Jarrett House in Dillsboro, the Nu-Wray Inn at Burnsville, and Cataloochee Ranch on Firetop Mountain above Maggie Valley.
Twice a day, the quiet of this sleepy little village is broken by the insistent urging, cajoling clang of the Jarrett House bell.
“We ring it at noon and at five o’clock to announce that the dining room is open,” said Jim Hartbarger, the genial boniface of the 93-year-old hostelry. “You can hear it a mile away. That’s why we don’t ring it at seven in the morning for breakfast.”
For some folks the old bell possesses the miraculous power of formenting a bewitching nostalgia.
It rouses a thousand memories of the recent past, a period with which most of us can identify, a time when there seemed to be a bell for everything.
Back then every bell had a special sound and a special meaning. The farm bell, usually fastened to a post out in the back yard of the house, was more than just a dinner bell. It was never rung just for fun, not even by grandpa’s favorite grandson.
The farm bell was meant to serve a definite purpose. Each family had a code for calling individual members of the house. So many tolling notes, repeated at one or two minute intervals, meant company had come for pleasure or business, or the cow had got loose, or there was an errand to run.
When wild clanging notes rang out without a break, everybody ran to the house. This meant something was bad wrong, either at home or at a neighbor’s. It meant fire or accident or sudden sickness—a call for help.
—John Parris – “The Old Dinner Bell”
Another bell often used for various reasons in the days John Parris describes was the church bell. Like today it was used to signal church was fixing to start, but it was also used to alert the community when someone passed away. Pap said the bell would ring for every year the person lived. Even though there were no telephones, the ringing of the bell often told people who might have died as they thought about the folks who were sickly in their area.
After Pap retired Granny got a dinner bell and hung it on the back porch. Pap would often slip off down to Paul’s to play the guitar or out to the garden to check on something. Granny would ring the bell to alert him she had his breakfast, dinner, or supper ready and he needed to come back home 🙂
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We had a dinner bell growing up in the 80’s Texas. It was a bell that came from an old timey fire truck. Myself, siblings, and cousins would all be playing in the creek, and the bell was rang to come home for dinner.
Us kids were the ‘dinner bell’. We could not sit down to supper until my father had come in from where ever he was working. He worked in a machine shop all day, but in the evening he came home & worked on the dairy, cleaning the barn, cutting hay, etc…or more often was tinkering with some car he was trying to keep alive. One of us would be sent out to ‘find’ him and come back in to tell my mother that he’d “be just a minute more”. Then the waiting……We’d all sit at the table until he came in, washed up, & sat down. None of this fixing yourself a plate & taking it to the living room. We could not take ONE BITE until he had his plate fixed & started eating. Dinner was an enjoyable time. My father was the life of the party and would tell jokes & stories about work. We would get to talk about school or friends – it would get quite loud. But there were rules. #1- no singing at the dinner table. Isn’t that a funny rule? Well, it applied to my dad, who liked to take popular songs & make up funny new lyrics using people/situations that we knew to make jokes. #2-no elbows, #3 -finish everything on your plate, etc…Every once in a while, though, someone would be messin’ up in life & dinner time was the reprimanding hour. oh, how I hated to be on that end of the stick. Because, one rule was you could not leave the table until you were finished eating, were excused, or everyone else was done eating. You had to just sit there & take it. I have pretty much followed these rules with my own 2 (except the singing one – because my hubby is just like my dad & loves to make us laugh w/his weird renditions). I also don’t reprimand at the table. My kids & all their friends love dinner at our house. It gets a little crazy sometimes, but fun. So, nothing to do with bells. But everything to do with what happened after being rung in!!! BTW, we do have a dinner bell hung in the kitchen, just for fun. PS – only electronic bells at our churches & I HATE THEM. Cheesy.
I have such a Bell at our step off to the left of the main deck attached to the back of our house. The Bell was purchased from a neighbor who had it in Wisconsin on a dairy farm. I think of Bill and Clara each time I see the Bell, my grandkids love to ring it too !!!!
Ours was cast in Hillsboro, Ohio.in the 1880’s if I am not mistaken.
My first semester at Mississippi State (derogatorily “Cow College” by the snobs 93 miles away) my dorm was right next to the Chapel of Memories and the bells rang loud and clearly each morning at 7, offending the professionally offended. And if you want to hear BELLS, go to Scott Field to a football game or to Dudy Noble Field and you will definitely hear bells.
I remember the school yard bell, Baptist church bell, Methodist church bell and my community church bell which was a large brass bell. But the bells that I remember the most was the COW bells from my Grand parents dairy farm in WV. I would sit on the front porch of my home during the summer months and listen for long periods of time to those cow bells ringing in the mountains. My Grand mother would say ” I can hear Blackie, Kicker and Red’s bell, but Blue and Spot must be layin’ down chewin’ CUD.” Never forget. Thanx Tipper
The dinner bell my dear Mother rang for 7 siblings back when still brings a tear to my eyes. Those were the days when you needed to move fast or you can forget a warm meal. God Bless my dear Mom who chimes her bell still to this day in my memory
Ah, the dinner bell! My grandparents had one on their farm (in southern Indiana) and it was a thrill when I got to ring it to call Grandpa in to noon dinner! Back then I was a little girl and it seemed so enormously tall! Many, many years have passed since then and I now have the dinner bell in my yard in Kentucky. Funny how it shrank over the years!
Tipper, you have a genius for picking topics and for writing about them. Thank You!!!!
The first bell I remember well was on rung by a teacher on our elementary school to mark the end of ‘recess’ and lunch period. The school didn’t have an intercom or electric bell. The hand bell did the job. I’d pay dearly to have that bell and hear its clanging again.
The last time I stayed at the Fryemont Inn in Bryson City, the courthouse bells were still rung on the hour and chimed once for each hour marked. Anyone in Bryson who can tell us if that is still the case?
Church bells: Many churches in Raleigh rang their bells to mark services and also to mark the time of day. I suspect the practice has been discontinued because there is so much background noise these days the bells would be drowned out. There’s nothing today like a quiet summer morning and hearing church bells sound the hour. We have a church the next town over that plays electronic chimes to mark the hour, but they don’t carry very far because traffic noise drowns them out. I worked in Spain (Madrid) for a time in 1991-92. Most churches there rang their bells. It was a beautiful thing to experience.
Farm bells were still around in the ’50s in Eastern NC. You didn’t hear them in Winter because no one was working fields at that time of year.
Here is my favorite poem about bells: The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe (with apologies for taking up the space but perhaps others will enjoy it too.
Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
II.
Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!
III.
Hear the loud alarum bells—
Brazen bells!
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now—now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling.
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—
Of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!
IV.
Hear the tolling of the bells—
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people—ah, the people—
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone—
They are neither man nor woman—
They are neither brute nor human—
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the pæan of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pæan of the bells—
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells—
Bells, bells, bells—
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.
From The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. II, 1850. For oth
Almond Grammar School had a bell. It sat out next to the road. It was on a rock column about four feet off the ground. It had a wheel with a groove for a rope but no rope. The clapper had also been removed. The only way to ring it was to hit it with something which we weren’t allowed to do. Sometimes it had wasper nests. The only way to know was to turn the wheel then take a peek inside. If you weren’t quick enough you got stung.
The bell was larger than most. If memory serves it was about two feet across at the lip. I don’t know what the bell was made of because of the many layers of paint on it. I don’t know why it was there in the first place. The school itself was relatively new compared to the old bell. Perhaps the bell had been at the old Almond High School or at one of the churches displaced by the flooding waters of Fontana Reservoir.
Eventually Almond Elementary School was closed when it consolidated with Alarka to become West Swain Elementary. The old Almond School building became a satellite location of Southwestern Community College. I don’t know if that old bell is still there. I hope so!
I grew up in a community with a Baptist church and a Methodist church. Church bells were rung to summon help to dig graves, help an injured neighbor, fight a fire or any other emergency. One farm where I worked had a triangle and another where the wife would honk the car horn a few times as a signal. I don’t remember any bells. The triangle and car horn sounds carried quite a way to the back fields.
I should have known but didn’t that there were different bell clangs to summon different people and events. It was a valuable form of communication that was replaced with the ‘text message’. When my daughter married in a little island town down here in FL, our church still rang it’s steeple bell. My grandsons got the pleasure of ringing in the happy news of her marriage. New Years’ Eve is still celebrated in this house by kids staying up (or being woke up) at midnight and grabbing a pot and wooden spoon, we all go out on the front porch and bang away yelling Happy New Year. A really fun time together and yet, I’m sure, will be a good memory someday, also. My neighbor’s probably don’t enjoy it here in town.
I love this post and the story of Granny’s bell. Even though I do not quite go back to the days when ringing a bell was popular, I do remember the unique ways before the telephone that children and men were alerted. Dad had the loudest shrill whistle that would alert that it was time to eat or come home.
I have a fond memory of running errands as a young child to the company store for neighbors, and I would receive a nickel or dime. The running exercises for women were unheard of in those days, because it was a known fact that women got almost too much exercise just doing all the chores which usually included a garden. They had no time and had little ones, so walking to the company store was done by children a lot. With no phones, I once had to stop and pass on news to a family that the man’s mother was sick. There were lots of ways to spread the news around before telephones were common. I was in the hospital, and I still remember the first time I ever talked on a phone. My dad called my hospital room from the tipple and asked if it would be okay if they skipped a visit. I was so much more overjoyed with the telephone call. Besides when I was sick, he bought me what we called “funny books” to read. It’s a wonder I didn’t play sick! 🙂 We had all forms of other communication, but I missed the bell. I did get my mom a neat little bell to ring when she was older. It was a very recognizable sound to alert me of her needs.
Beautiful post that certainly brought back memories for me as I’m sure it has for many others.
I live in the city, so dinner call was just a holler, but two sounds that always send me back & fill me with delight to this day are churchbells & train whistles. Not always with exact memories, but always with wonderful feelings. They always make me stop & smile.
In our town and many small towns Armistice Day, now Veterans Day is celebrated by ringing a bell in the early hours on the morning of Nov 11. Our Veterans mount a bell in the bed of a Pickup and drive the streets, ringing the bell to remind us of the sacrifices our men and woman made. I love hearing it and hope the tradition us never stopped.
the jarrett house is undergoing a major renovation! it has been… but i was by there a week ago and the outside is scraped down and walls and foundations are being fixed. id say its a serious renovation from top to bottom.
i remember dinner bells and church bells.
my granny had a hand pump we would wash up on back porch before coming inside.
Bells are sweet voices that call us and punctuate the important moments of our lives. Our church still rings its bell on Sundays and other important events.
Your comment reminded me of that old song ‘All the chapel bells were ringing, for the baby Jimmy Brown’. Not sure of the real title but it marked the important days of his life.
“The Three Bells”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJCvPhqcY9A
Those were the days long ago and almost forgotten had you not reminded us of those sweet memories. I so look forward to your postings and the responses from your devoted followers…you are a gem.
No dinner bells in my memory except I gave my Dad one long after I was married and gone. He mounted it on a cedar post close to the front door but it was rarely rung. In that poor country there probably wasn’t a dozen farms where a dinner bell would actually have been a practical need because the farms were too small to need a sound that carried so far.
I have posted about this before but the church I grew up in had a bell and bell tower. The pull rope was just inside the front door, out of reach of the kids. We thought it a great thrill to be held up so we could pull the rope to announce church starting. On one rare occasion Dad, my brother and I were about a quarter mile away getting in hay before rain and it was church time. We heard the bell (I think for prayer meeting on Thursday night). It was a lovely sound. I would like to live where I could hear an old-fashioned (not electronic) church bell but then why would I be home to hear it at church time?
When I was a kid in the Ivy Log area of
Union County if we heard a church bell any time other than for Sunday service, it meant that somebody had died. Come to the cemetery and help dig the grave.
Growing up in the 1960s we had a dinner bell my folks would ring when it was dinner time or just time to come home from play. As a kid, the sound brought feelings of lament since we had to give up our fun with friends and go home. Our bell was brass with a wooden handle like an old school handbell. I don’t know where my folks got it. It was just always a part of our family. It now sits on my fireplace mantel with tarnished brass and dark wood for the handle. But the sound is still clear and magical.
When I was a child my mom didn’t have a bell, she just hollered for us kids. The town I grew up in use to ring a church bell every hour, but they stopped ringing it back when I was in high school. Since moving to where I live now in NC, I’ve not heard church bells ring until my brother in-law moved to China Grove, NC. The church bells still ring there everyday, every hour and once for the half hour. It bothered him at first, but now he’s use to it. When my hubby and I visit him and his wife I find it comforting and gives the town a sweet charm. It brings back sweet memories of hearing my hometown in WV church bells ringing.
Great post today. Thank you for sharing it. I enjoyed reading John and your memories and it brought back some of our own sweet memories too.
Great story! I knew bells were used for other things besides time of day. We can hear the bells and chimes from The Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament two miles away in the morning. Our church has its original bell mounted so it can be rung. The kids love to ring it. It was cast in Chattanooga and is at least 100 years old
Wild Acres Retreat Center just off the Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, N.C. – my favorite place to sing the shape note music our forefathers sang – rings the dinner bell for all meals. This music is one of America’s oldest and least known music genres. Your ggg-grandparents might have sung these hymns at a brush arbor revival in the 1840s. The “Sacred Harp” is the human voice praising God and needs no instrumental accompaniment. Camp Doremi 2022 starts on August 11. It features the seven shape notation used mainly in the South rather than the four shape notation of New England songbooks. If you love singing hymns and love American history, you owe it to yourself to experience a shape note singing.
Visitors are welcome for the Saturday evening after-supper singing on August 14th. For directions to Wild Acres, visit wild acres.org. It’s a lovely place. If I were going to be there this year, I’d say “y’all come!” Since I can’t be there, I ‘ll just settle for “y’all go!”
Oops – make that Saturday, August 13th., 2022.
they don’t still ring it at the folk school??
Elithea-I bet they do 🙂
Sure hope so; always enjoyed hearing the ‘call to feed’ LOL
When I moved to Iowa from San Diego, my small town allowed the churches to ring their bells on Sunday morning still. My church would always have Watch Night on New Years Eve, and the kids got a thrill ringing the bell at midnight. My little town also ran the tornado siren (one blast) at noon and 6 pm everyday. The tornado siren was in the alley across the street from me, and I lived a block up from my church – so I got to hear both the bell and the siren loud and clear. I loved both of them, because they were an old fashioned holdover from a time long ago before I was born, and it was in a time when laws had been made saying church bells are offensive to hear on Sunday mornings. It is so sad that traditions are killed by a handful, when the majority enjoy them, or have learned to tune them out (and they don’t step on other people’s rights to keep enjoying them). There, you have my soapbox rant for the morning! I love your posts! Having grown up in a large city on the left coast, I missed out on so many old fashioned traditions that people with small town life still got to enjoy (and still get to in some places). Part of me misses my big city life, and another part of me is so happy to be in an area that still values traditions. Sometimes I feel like Lisa Douglas from the old Green Acres sitcom. She’s me, I am her. Happy wherever I live, but you can’t take the city completely out of me. Her part of that show’s theme song could be me singing it a lot of days. Except, I don’t have a Mr. Douglas. So no one is making me live in North Carolina but myself. I could also sing his part of the song, except I don’t live on a farm, just in a small city (town to me). The fresh air and the scenery here in my part of NC is what I yearned for all my life since I was little. Thank you for another fun and wonderful post!!
Donna. : )
Another wonderful tradition, like the church bells, that is missing from today’s “progressive” world.
Sorry, I meant to say back home in my last sentence and also say there is a church at Belton, SC that will ring the church bells each day at 12 o’clock noon time.
My grandmother would ring a bell to let my granddaddy know that she had dinner ready. He would often be in a field plowing with his mule named Kate. When the bell rang, Kate would stop, it made no difference if it was in the middle of the row, she knew she was going back to the house along with grandaddy to get some food, water and rest for awhile. . If the bell was being rung at any other time of day it meant we need help, something has happened and the neighbors would come to see what was wrong. My area did not get telephones until the mid 60’s. I know have this bell in my yard still mounted on the solid heart cedar post it was mounted on in the 50’s .Back in those times, if I was not in school I would be like a shadow to my grandaddy, I wanted to be with him all the time and because of living beside of him, I was able to do this until daddy came home and then I wanted to be with my daddy. Grandaddy would take a short nap each day after eating his dinner and I would have to go back then until he got back up.
The last dinner bell I heard was at Pisgah View Ranch at Chandler, N.C. I was on a high school reunion trip and we would sit in chairs near the dining area and wait for the bell to ring, the food was worth the wait. Thanks for the memory. Dennis Morgan
When I was young, we went to Camp Hope, up above Canton, NC, in the mountains. They had a big bell that they rang to wake up in the morning and to announce all meals. I well remember it’s ringing sound! There was no missing it’s announcements as the sound reverberated through the mountains!