Here’s a Bluffton story ripe for Oct. 31. 

For best effect, turn out your lights except for perhaps a candle, flashlight or very dim lamp. A handful of Bluffton residents know a different version, with a plausible explanation. If interested, bring this up to Nancy King, Sam Diller or Charles Hilty. 

In the meantime, we stand by the following account.

In 1954 Bluffton voters approved a decision to raze the old Victorian-style Bluffton school building making way for a modern structure. It was an emotional decision, but necessary.

The old school stood on South Jackson Street, at the dead end of Church Street. The elementary building, which replaced it, lives on the site today, encompassing the entire block.

Built by Victorian-era architects in 1875 when U.S. Grant was president, the grand Old Lady originally had no electricity. That came later. It had huge windows that rattled in high winds. The third-floor gymnasium was condemned. 

With high steps to its front door, it was unaware of today’s ADA standards. You should have seen the bathrooms.

The building was no longer large enough to handle the explosion of Bluffton’s on-coming baby boomers. The Old Lady advanced toward its 80thdecade, carrying whispers of dementia. 

It had outlived itself.

Today, we look back fondly and wonder, how could we have saved this from the wrecking ball? But it was not to be. It’s called progress.

The Old Lady had a large bell that called students to school. Today, that bell stands proudly on ground level between the middle school and elementary.

So, as she came down in the summer of 1954 the entire town watched. They took bricks, school desks (containing holes for ink wells) and blackboards home with them as remembrances of their own school days. 

The majority of bricks were unceremoniously dumped in an unmarked grave along the university side of West Elm Street, which now forms a hill facing Marbeck Center. Back then there were no issues about filling in flood plains.

There’s a story that Leland Gerber, who lived on Lawn Avenue across from the school, filmed the building’s final gasp.

From time to time today, when work on the playground requires digging, up comes a brick or two from the old building.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The last portion of the building to go was the belfry with the bell still in place. As the belfry – the only portion of the building standing -– breathed its last sighs on the last evening of its existence something unexpected occurred.

On that last evening, a sound came from the bell tower. 

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong…into Bluffton’s otherwise quiet summer nighttime hours.

Eerie? No doubt. The lonely peeling of the bell, its swan song, sang one last time to all who had attended school there. The sound reverberated across the village.

The odd thing is that there was no rope tied to the bell. The clapper was removed and, how could anyone climb to the bell tower?

John Donne’s poem attempts to answer the question for whom the bell tolls.

The Bluffton school bell in the long-ago summer of 1954 answered that question to itself.

Happy Halloween,
Fred-in-Stein