After 177 years, 1,200 miles, $35,000 and a 70-page report by historians from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a 782-pound church bell was returned to its original home in Iowa City.
On Oct. 5, Iowa City’s First Presbyterian Church held a dedication and blessing for what they now call their “Hummer Bell.” It’s a three-foot-wide bronze bell named for the church’s first pastor, Rev. Michael Hummer, whose foibles later made it famous. The ceremony marked the return of the bell after it had been smuggled out of Iowa in 1850.
What’s the significance of this particular bell? It’s a story full of intrigue — mistaken identity, theft, arson and even a “madman” with an “ungovernable temper” trapped in a belltower.
Rev. Hummer, a controversial and “peculiar” Kentuckian, obtained the bell during fundraising travels for the Iowa City church he co-founded. It was manufactured in West Troy, New York, and purchased with donations from First Presbyterian’s original congregants, who were also some of Iowa City’s earliest territorial settlers.
While their building was under construction on land donated by Chauncey and Dolly Swan — where Old Brick is now — Hummer’s congregation met in the Capitol Building — now the Old Capitol — where the bell tolled from the east door. Iowa City historians say it was among the first to ring out over the town and on this side of the Mississippi River.
Later, after parting ways with First Presbyterian Church and moving to Keokuk, Rev. Hummer returned to Iowa City and attempted to take the bell, now mounted in the in-progress Presbyterian Church, as compensation for unpaid wages. However, while lowering the bell from its tower, townspeople moved his ladder and he became stuck, “raving and scolding and gesticulating like a madman” and throwing bricks while the crowd laughed.
Meanwhile, a group of four Iowa Citians conspired to stop the apparent robbery by sinking the desired object into the Iowa River. It was supposed to reemerge after Hummer’s financial disputes with the church were settled; instead, the four men, swearing themselves to secrecy, recovered the bell, stowed it in a huge sugar barrel and took it with them as they traveled west toward the California Gold Rush. They joined a pioneer freight company bound for Utah, arriving in Salt Lake City in 1850. There, they sold the bell to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for $600; a former Iowa Citian, Asa Calkins, negotiated the sale. It was placed in storage.
Iowa Citians mourned the disappearance of their bellowing totem, described as “a gem of a bell” and “a treasure,” “alone in its glory.” One William H. Tuthill sung an ode to the lost artifact, immortalized in the Annals of Iowa.
Ah, Hummer’s bell! Ah, Hummer’s bell!
We’ve heard thy last, they funeral knell,
And what an aching void is left,
Of bell and Hummer both bereft.
Thou, deeply sunk in running stream,
Him in a Swedenborgian dream.
Both are submerged, both, to our cost,
Alike to sense and reason lost.
Locals were left to speculate where the bell ended up. A clairvoyant friend of Hummer’s said it was dropped down a well, while Hummer himself claimed “spirits” revealed to him it was buried under the Old Capitol.
Eventually, one of the four original “rescuers,” A.B. Newcomb, abandoned the Gold Rush and returned to Iowa City, finally revealing the fate of the bell. His story was confirmed by none other than LDS prophet Brigham Young, responding to an inquiry from First Presbyterian’s Rev. S.M. Osmond.
“The bell is still laying here idle, as it always has done, and it is at your disposal … whenever you please to send for it,” Young wrote Osmond in 1868. The community was thrilled, but there was little urgency to take Young up on his offer; after all, they’d fundraised for a replacement bell in 1855, only for it to be ruined — and their entire church along with it — in a fire the next year. The Civil War complicated things further.
Even as the Hummer saga became popular legend, recounted over and over in local newspapers and histories at the turn of the century, the instrument at the center of it remained out of reach. But it wouldn’t stay quiet forever.
Around the same time as the Hummer incident, persecuted Latter-day Saints were moving west on the Mormon Trail. Church members removed the bell from their Nauvoo Temple in Illinois before arsonists ravaged the structure in 1848. It chimed in Temple Square in Salt Lake City until it cracked the next winter and was destroyed after failed attempts at recasting.
Jump to 1939, and the Hummer Bell was pulled from an exhibit and mistakenly referred to as the Nauvoo bell. After nearly 100 years, the accidental switcheroo seems feasible. It was hung in Temple Square, and its clear, crisp chime marked the top of the hour on radio stations across the country.
It took until the following century for an investigation by Latter-day Saints historians to initiate “corrective efforts.” That’s when First Presbyterian Church got the call. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints not only returned the Hummer Bell, but funded a restoration to its original appearance.
The bell has taken a remarkable journey, from its origins in New York, to its hiding place in the Iowa River, to tolling on the big stage in Utah. Now, in 2025, it has made its way home to First Presbyterian Church on Rochester Avenue in Iowa City, where it welcomes congregants to Sunday worship service from outside their fellowship hall.
In his sermon on Oct. 5, First Presbyterian Pastor Nathan Willard said, “Every time this bell rings, we think not only of the people who heard it in Iowa City, but the people who heard it for decades in Salt Lake City, and say, ‘This unites us.’”
This article is from Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
