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RedditLoud the morning bell is ringing, Up, up sleepers, haste away; Yonder sits the redbreast singing, But to list we must not stay.
Now we give a welcome greeting To these viands cooked so well; Horror! oh! not half done eating— Rattle, rattle goes the bell!
—From an anonymous poem, printed in Factory Girl’s Garland, a literary magazine from Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1844
The black, cast-metal bell in the National Museum of American History’s "On Time" exhibition has lost its clapper. Still, it’s not hard to imagine its resounding ring. It wasn’t so long ago that this bell was the focus of life for the residents of North Andover, Massachusetts, where it once graced the tower of Davis and Furber, a textile machine factory that opened in the 1830s and closed, finally, in 1982.
As New England shifted from farming to industry in the 19th century, Americans’ sense of time changed radically. Before 1820, most citizens did not own clocks or even know how to tell time, and work hours were determined by the sun and the seasons. But as people by the hundreds of thousands left farms for factories, and bells divided life into segments of work and leisure, time took on new meaning.
Bells announced mealtimes and rang to start and end work shifts. Factory workers might begin their days at 4:30 A.M. with the first dawn bell, and a curfew bell would signal when workers were expected to go to bed.
"In the early 1800s, upper-class people in America made an obsessive point of scheduling," says Carlene Stephens, a curator of the "On Time" exhibition, "but the idea was completely new for common folks on the farm." Also new, she says, "was the idea of working for someone else on someone else’s schedule, for a wage."
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