Press Room

In just one month, the third annual National Bell Festival returns with the privilege of ringing in the New Year. This year’s community festival will be our most thundering yet! With bells ringing across Washington, D.C. at our festival hub, across America in our coast-to-coast ringing, and across the globe in our first-ever Ring around the World event.

When a neighbor needs help, you help them. That’s why, when the Military Women’s Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery mentioned they needed some help readying their museum and education center for upcoming renovations, we at the National Bell Festival leapt into action with a lending hand.

When St. Bernadette Church in Springfield, Virginia, was dedicated in 1981, parishioners delighted in the contemporary architectural stylings that would form their new spiritual refuge. A massive 4,900-pound block of split, natural wood, supported on a thick foundation of steel-reinforced concrete, would serve as the new altar. His Holiness Pope John Paul II had celebrated Mass on the National Mall at the same altar two years before.

Fallout continues after the October 2021 publication of the Pandora Papers, a cache of almost 12 million documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The documents provide a glimpse into a shadow financial system that benefits the world’s richest and most powerful individuals – including art dealer Douglas Latchford, who was indicted in 2019 by U.S. prosecutors after decades of alleged trafficking in looted antiquities.

The Bourdon bell at Washington National Cathedral will toll 700 times this evening in honor of the 700,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began early last year. Each sounding of the bell, one toll for every 1,000 people, will ripple across the skies of Washington in solemn remembrance. The tolling will begin at 5:00pm local time and is expected to last approximately 70 minutes.

A new park surrounding a historic bell tower has just opened to the public in Salisbury, North Carolina. After more than two years of construction (ground breaking for the project was Aug. 3, 2019) and over four years of planning and private fundraising to amass more than $13 million, construction barriers have finally come down on Bell Tower Green.

Greater vaccine adoption across England means that the beleaguered City of London is finally able to reopen. COVID-19 restrictions across the city are being eased and people are gathering together again. Certainly reason to celebrate!

This June 26 marks the 200th anniversary of Rev. Henry Thomas Ellacombe’s invention of a mechanism that allowed a single person to ring a set of tower bells. Two centuries ago, the good reverend sat in his study and lamented the unruly, disobedient, and downright drunkard behavior of the local troupe of change ringers. He had a mind to do something about it.

The pandemic has left many grieving hearts in its wake. Those in the business of making bells felt this all too keenly this spring when Luigi Bergamo, 76, former director of the Cornille-Havard bell foundry in Villedieu-les-Poêles and a titan of campanology, succumbed to complications from COVID-19.

Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Britain’s oldest factory, shut its doors in 2017 and a fight for its future has been raging ever since. The foundry had been casting bronze bells in London since 1570. Big Ben was made there in 1858. The Liberty Bell was made there in 1752. Over the centuries, bells from Whitechapel had made their way all over the world. Some 500 Whitechapel tower bells can be found in Australia, 600 in the US, and at least 900 in Canada.