‘Babylonian Bell Trash:’ The Hidden History of Lancaster’s Liberty Bell

“Destroy it.”

That was Conrad Beissel’s order when a large bronze bell arrived from England for the Ephrata Cloister in the mid-1700s.

To Beissel, the bell represented vanity, ambition, and a direct challenge to his authority. He reportedly dismissed it as “Babylonian Bell Trash” and wanted it broken apart and buried. Yet despite this condemnation, the 400-pound bell survives to this day inside Lancaster City’s Grace Lutheran Church.

It has been called Lancaster’s Liberty Bell for more than a century. According to local tradition, it rang before the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Lancaster. Later, it summoned volunteer firefighters. Before that, it hung in the tower of Trinity Lutheran Church during the American Revolution.

The story of Lancaster’s Liberty Bell begins in 1745, when Israel Eckerlin ordered it for the religious community at Ephrata.

At the time, Ephrata Cloister was unlike anything else in colonial Pennsylvania. Founded in 1732 along Cocalico Creek in northern Lancaster County, the community grew into one of the most remarkable religious settlements in British America. Its members operated gristmills and paper mills, maintained orchards and workshops, and produced beautifully printed books using one of the most important German-language printing presses in the colonies. Hundreds of men, women, and children called Ephrata home.

Ephrata is remembered today for both its austere lifestyle and its haunting music. During the 1740s, the community’s Solitary Sisters composed intricate a cappella devotional hymns and are recognized among America’s earliest identified female composers.

Ephrata was also a remarkably organized enterprise, and few people were more responsible for that success than Israel Eckerlin.

Known within the community as Brother Onesimus, Eckerlin served as prior of the Brotherhood and essentially functioned as Ephrata’s business manager. He supervised its industries, finances, and daily operations. Practical, intelligent, and ambitious, he helped transform the settlement into a thriving community.

His growing influence, however, alarmed Ephrata’s founder, Conrad Beissel.

Beissel envisioned a life of humility, sacrifice, and separation from worldly ambition. Eckerlin’s administrative ability brought prosperity, but prosperity also carried the temptations of pride and authority. Over time, the two men came to represent competing visions for the future of Ephrata.

Then the bell arrived.

Without first obtaining Beissel’s approval, Eckerlin ordered the massive bronze bell from England’s Whitechapel Bell Foundry—the same forge that produced Philadelphia’s State House Bell, known today as the Liberty Bell. More provocative still was the Latin inscription cast into its shoulder:

Sub Auspicio Viri Venerandi Onesimi Societatis Ephratensis Praepositi.

Translated, it reads:

“By order of the Venerable Onesimus, Superior of the Ephrata Society.”

Those words transformed the bell from a church instrument into something much larger.

Eckerlin was not merely identifying himself as the purchaser. To Beissel, the inscription proclaimed Onesimus as the superior of Ephrata itself.

According to Bradley Smith, site administrator at Ephrata Cloister, the inscription was the final insult. Beissel already viewed Eckerlin as a rival. The bell became the symbol of that rivalry.

He reportedly condemned it as “Babylonian Bell Trash” and ordered that it be destroyed.

George L. Heiges, writing in the Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society, tells a slightly different version of the same story. He writes that Beissel rejected the bell as one of the “worldly trappings of the churches” and ordered it broken apart and buried.

Destroying it, however, presented a problem. The community still owed a substantial amount of money for the bell. While accounts vary between sources, the debt was around £80, a significant financial burden.

After reconsidering the matter, Beissel reportedly declared that because the brethren were poor, the bell should be “pardoned.” The order to destroy it became an order to sell it.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity agreed to pay the outstanding debt. The bell was brought from Philadelphia to Lancaster and raised into the steeple of Trinity’s original stone church on Duke Street.

Today, church bells are largely ceremonial. In the eighteenth century, they were one of the community’s primary means of communication.

Most Lancaster residents owned neither clocks nor watches. Newspapers circulated slowly and reached relatively few people. There were no telephones, radios, or push notifications. When the church bell rang unexpectedly, people stopped what they were doing. Something important had happened.

For the next century, the former Ephrata Cloister bell became one of Lancaster’s public voices. It called worshippers to Trinity’s services. It announced civic occasions. It marked celebrations, emergencies, and days of mourning. It rang over a town that was steadily growing from a frontier settlement into one of Pennsylvania’s most important inland communities.

Then came the Revolution.

The bell became part of the soundscape of one of the most turbulent periods in Lancaster’s history. Local tradition at Grace Lutheran Church holds that it rang on July 8, 1776, summoning residents to what is now Penn Square for Lancaster’s first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. By then, Trinity owned another English bell as well. Writing in 1979, church historian George Heiges cautiously stated that “the bell or bells” announced the news of independence when it reached Lancaster.

Grace Lutheran Church also preserves the tradition that the bell rang the following year, when the Continental Congress arrived in Lancaster on September 27, 1777. Pastor Stephen Verkouw has described church bells as the town’s public means of communication, calling residents together when important news or events demanded their attention. According to that tradition, its voice sounded over Lancaster during the extraordinary day when the borough briefly became the seat of the national government.

When Trinity completed its elegant new church and towering steeple during the late eighteenth century, the Ephrata Cloister bell was moved into the new tower alongside Trinity’s own bell from 1768. The two bells remained there until 1853.

That year, five Lancaster citizens offered to donate a new peal of eight bells to Trinity. The congregation accepted, trading its two older bells to the manufacturer.

Fortunately, neither historic bell left the city.

Gottlob, also written as Gottlieb in some sources, Sener purchased the former Ephrata bell and immediately donated it to Lancaster’s Washington Fire Company on North Queen Street. For nearly thirty years, the same bell that had once called colonists to worship now summoned firefighters to danger.

When Lancaster replaced its volunteer companies with a municipal fire department in the early 1880s, J. Frederick Sener acquired the bell and presented it to Grace Lutheran Church, returning it to religious service.

According to later accounts, a crack in 1888 silenced it forever. So, like Philadelphia’s famous Liberty Bell, Lancaster’s own Liberty Bell would never ring again.

Over time, the old bell quietly slipped into obscurity. People walked past it without realizing they were standing beside a bell cast before the United States existed. Visitors admired Grace’s beautiful sanctuary while the old bronze relic sat largely unnoticed near the bell tower stairwell. Its remarkable history became known only to a handful of historians and church members.

Then, in 2026, that changed.

As the nation prepared to celebrate its 250th birthday, Grace Lutheran decided the bell deserved a more prominent place. Carpenter and craftsman Ron Leik built a handsome new stand, and the 400-pound bell was moved from the bell-tower stairwell into the church’s solarium. Grace eventually hopes to create a permanent outdoor display where the bell’s remarkable story can be shared with the wider community. Those interested in supporting the project can donate through the church’s website.

Nearly three centuries earlier, Conrad Beissel had ordered the bell destroyed. Instead, it survived a religious power struggle, the American Revolution, Lancaster’s transformation from colonial town to city, the age of volunteer fire companies, and generations of quiet obscurity.

The crack in its bronze has long since silenced its voice, but the bell Beissel condemned as “Babylonian Bell Trash” is finally telling its story.

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Resources

• The hidden history of Lancaster’s Liberty Bell
• The Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity, Lancaster, Pennsylvania: part one, 1730-1861 by George L. Heiges
• Grace Lutheran Church May 2026 Newsletter
• Grace Lutheran Church July 2026 Newsletter