Fred and Carole Barber have fond memories of when they let their children into the bell tower at Grace Episcopal Church in Oak Park to see the Seabury Chime.
They climbed the black, iron circular staircase up into the church’s 1922 bell tower where an array of 10 bronze bells of ascending size hung from giant rafters. The largest of the bells, a 3,500-pound behemoth, swung freely with a rope dangling to activate it.
Their kids, now adults, were small enough that when they pulled the rope dangling from the large bell, the recoil hoisted them into the air as the toll resounded throughout the neighborhood.
“The kids didn’t realize the bell was so heavy, and when they pulled the string they got pulled up,” Carole Barber recalled, chuckling.
The remaining nine bells in the Seabury Chime were fixed in place, activated by a series of nearby levers attached to clappers and calibrated so that they could be pulled in sequence to create hymns and other tones heard for miles around.
The Barbers have since brought their grandchildren into the bell tower for that same, loud experience, before Fred Barber would take the controls of the carillon to perform a selection of chimed hymns.
But it’s been a number of years. Right around the same time as the Grace Episcopal congregation was marking the 100th anniversary of the first sounding of the Seabury Chime three years ago, Fred Barber arrived early to church to find one of the cables had snapped. Church officials sent someone up to investigate and discovered the 10-by-10 wooden timbers supporting the bells had deteriorated.
“It wasn’t safe to ring them anymore,” Fred Barber said. “So they went silent.”
On Sunday, the Seabury Chime will sound again after a three-year odyssey that included the bells being stranded in Indiana by the shuttering of one restoration firm. There also was a rescue effort by eighth-generation bell forgers whose company was born from the ashes of the French Revolution.
For the Barbers, the official return of the Seabury Chime at a 10:30 a.m. service on Sunday, Nov. 16, followed by a performance of hymns at the church, 924 Lake St., will be like welcoming back an old friend.
“I’m so thrilled to have the bells back,” Carole Barber said. “I’ve missed them so much.”
The Barbers are among the most tenured members of Grace Episcopal’s congregation, having started attending services there as a young family nearly 50 years ago. They remember how in 1979, a team of five ringers tolled the big bell 52 times each day during the Iran hostage crisis — once for each person held in the American embassy in Tehran. That went on for 444 days.
And they remembered during the COVID-19 pandemic how ringers would “go up at noon and ring 12 tolls and a series of hymns each day,” Fred Barber said.
He was part of that effort, having signed on as one of the church’s three carillonneurs about 20 years ago.
Until falling silent three years ago, the bells were part of weekly services at Grace, as well as “weddings and funerals, including those of my parents,” Fred Barber said. He was able to choose the hymns he performed on the chime at those funerals, including “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” (The Navy Hymn) for his father, a World War II Navy veteran.
Fellow Oak Parker Charles Wells, who’s been a member at Grace for about 40 years, loves the sound of the bells. But he’s even more fond of the traditions link to his church.
Grace Episcopal has been a fixture in downtown Oak Park since the cornerstone was laid in about 1900 near Lake Street and Forest Avenue, said Wells, a history buff and author of several books about colonial burial grounds in Boston.
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He cited information compiled by fellow parishioner Marilyn Wardle and printed in the newsletter of the Oak Park Historical Society as the bells were turning 100 in 2022, noting they were donated by the son of Charles Seabury, who’d helped establish Grace Episcopal in Oak Park in 1880. Seabury, Wardle wrote, was a direct descendant of Bishop Samuel Seabury, who in 1784 became “the first Episcopal bishop consecrated for the American church after the Revolutionary War.”
Forged by the Meneely Bell Foundry in West Troy, New York, the bells were installed in the church’s new tower in 1922 and were first played Nov. 18 of that year.
A century later, church officials were figuring out how to make the Seabury Chime sound once again. The first company they hired folded abruptly. Their second effort led them to the shore of Lake Annecy in France and the Paccard Bell Foundry.
According company lore, the Paccard’s founder got into the bell business in 1796 after his town’s church bell was melted down for cannons and coins amid the French Revolution.
Eight generations later, members of the Paccard family were on hand in October as the 10 bells of the Seabury Chime arrived in Oak Park on two flatbed trucks.
The Barbers also were on site as the large bell was maneuvered near the top of the church tower, where a 4-foot opening had been chiseled from the masonry.
Once they got it up, they discovered the big bell was a half inch too wide for the opening.
“The tower is solid limestone, and those bells are solid brass, and they don’t give much,” Fred Barber said.
Workers were able to shave a bit from a mounting bolt at the top of the bell, allowing it to just fit into the opening, and “this time they slipped it in,” he said.
On Sunday, when Fred Barber and the church’s other two carillonneurs officially welcome the Seabury Chime’s sounds back to downtown Oak Park, he’ll open the performance with a tune he feels is particularly apt.
“I get to choose the hymn,” he said. “It’s Grace Church, so I chose ‘Amazing Grace.’ That’s what I’m going to start out with.”
He’ll also perform “Joyful, Joyful,” one of his wife’s favorites.
“Those bells mean a lot to us, and that’s why we wanted to see them restored,” Carole Barber said. “We have family that have rung them, and that makes it mean a little more even.”
Just as generations of Seaburys and generations of Paccards have played a role in Sunday’s resounding chimes, financial support from the Barbers helped return the bell tones to downtown Oak Park, and perhaps bring another bell ringing opportunity to the third generation of that family.
“We may let our grandsons ring it this coming celebration, too,” Carole Barber said.