Old bell from Talbott School returned, on display at Gateway

Sometimes things go full circle.

In 1973 the Talbott School, first built in 1909, was torn down on Fourth Avenue West in Columbia Falls after it was deemed too expensive to repair, rather than replace.

The school was named after James Talbott, the entrepreneur credited with founding Columbia Falls. It sat just to the east of where the new Glacier Gateway School is today.

All that remained of the Talbott school, aside from some concrete and even a few urinals that were buried onsite, was the cast iron bell.

Even that wasn’t highly regarded, noted longtime former school board trustee and teacher Larry Wilson. The bell sat in the weeds behind the old junior high. So when Wilson retired in the early 1970s, he put it in his pickup with the blessing of the school superintendent and hauled it up to his cabin up the North Fork, where it was used for decades as a dinner bell.

A few months ago Wilson decided to bring the bell back, with the help of recently retired superintendent Dave Wick and fellow retired teachers Mick Washburn and DeWayne Padgett.

The idea was to put it in the lawn of the new Glacier Gateway Elementary School.

So they loaded the bell up and brought it home.

Glacier Gateway maintenance man Mike Rosenbaum along with Derek Anello went to work making a platform for the bell made from bricks that were found buried at the site — presumably from the Talbott School. The bricks were dug up when crews did the excavation work for the new Gateway School.

The platform was recently completed along with iron benches so that today, the bell sits almost exactly where it was first hung more than 100 years ago.

May Ellen Getts’s fifth grade class has planted a native plants garden in front of the bell.

The only lament, Wilson said, was that one can no longer ring the bell — the clapper has been removed.

Still, it’s a nice little monument to times gone past.

Wilson noted that his grandfather, Jim Wilson, built the staircase for the original Talbott School.

The bell itself was cast by the O.J., Bell Co. and has the number 28 on it — which may or may not mean the date it was cast. If it was cast in 1928, it would mean it came 27 years after the Talbott School was first constructed.

Gateway will have an open house from 5 to 7 p.m. Oct. 24 where the public is encouraged to check out the bell as well as tour the new school, which was completed last December.