Before the days of CNN or Fox News, Nathaniel P. Bliss announced the news with this bell as Marblehead’s final town crier in the late 1800s. Bliss carried on a tradition that started in Marblehead in 1679, when the town paid John Ashton 40 shillings for crying the hours and ringing the 9 p.m. curfew bell.
In the days before high literacy rates and wide circulation of newspapers, town criers had an essential job of keeping their public informed, and they continued this role in the 19th century. For 50 cents, criers like Jonas Bettis, Nathan Homan, Rea Nourse and Nathaniel Bliss acted as a newspaper in flesh and blood, announcing town meetings, sales, ship arrivals, births and deaths, weddings and anything else people wanted to know. The bell served as a visual and audible cue that the crier was prepared to announce important news, and it played a similar role to other public bells like the ones in churches or town halls, which gathered large groups for ceremonies or events. Town criers also had the solemn duty of announcing tragic events, as Jonas Bettis did when he called mariners’ wives to the port to inform them of the Great Gale of 1846, which cost 65 sailors their lives.
In 1888, Nathaniel Bliss faced a close call when his bell burned in the Great Fire that ravaged Pleasant Street, and he replaced it with this pewter bell. By the late 1880s, Bliss’s job had become obsolete, thanks to increased literacy rates and the communications revolution that put weekly newspapers within reach of every American, including our own Marblehead Messenger. Bliss died in 1898, and Marbleheaders remembered him fondly for his service in a period when breaking news came from a man on the street.
Jarrett Zeman is the assistant director of the Marblehead Museum. “From the Vault” is a partnership between the Marblehead Museum and the Marblehead Current.
