The Nanton School Bell
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Although the community hasn’t heard the bell ring for many years, the Nanton school bell is a central feature of the school community. As construction begins on the new and modernized Nanton schools, we look at the bell’s connections to the past.
Currently the bell stands atop a brick stand on the A.B. Daley Community School property. A bronze plaque beneath the bell reads:
This school bell was in service at the Nanton School District No. 720 from 1906-1918 and the Nanton Consolidated School District No. 50 from 1918-1963.
The metal yoke of the bell includes the words “American Bell Foundry Company”, a foundry established in 1895 in Northville, Michigan.
Former Nanton School student, John Loree, who graduated in 1964, shares some memories of the bell.
“The bell was originally in the tower of the old brick school on the west end of the block that contains the lodge. The bell was rung several times a day from a rope that reached the basement and the janitor or a teacher would ring it. Miss Annie B. Daley was a Nanton School teacher from 1919 to 1961 and she would have rung it in early years. My dad, Gerald Loree, was on the school board when the brick school was torn down. The bell was kept at our farm from the time it was removed from the old school until it was placed at A.B. Daley School.”
Loree says that there were often pranks pulled by students with the bell. “Sometimes the rope was tied off so it couldn’t be rung. The best prank was on Halloween when students climbed onto the roof of the two-storey school (no small feat) at night and removed the clapper from the bell and somehow it ended up in a teacher’s fridge at home.”
For nearly six decades, the school bell called students to class, let them out for lunchtime, and rang them home at the end of the day. In more recent years the bell has been a welcoming spot for first day of school pictures for Nanton families and stands as a symbol of the long tradition of educational excellence in the community.
The bell and plaque will be carefully removed and stored during the modernization of the A.B. Daley Community School building and construction of the new high school. We look forward to it becoming a part of the next chapter in Nanton’s schooling story.
