WOFFORD’S INFAMOUS BELL TOWER HAS A SECRET HISTORY—

The night of Oct. 22, 1998. was a night of adventure for senior Rebecca Raulerson. She and then junior Remsen Parrish had just snuck into Leonard Auditorium in the hopes of catching the “eyes of Old Main,” a superstition that a pair of green, glowing eyes shines at night above one of the paintings on the wall. They walked into the empty auditorium, the paintings of past presidents looming over them in the dark. Many students before her had tried to find the green eyes staring back at them. Whether they truly saw them or not, the legend was passed down from class to class, thriving only through the students. The same went for other campus traditions as well, perhaps the most infamous of them being to sneak into the bell tower of Old Main, dating back so far in Wofford’s history it is impossible to actually pinpoint when the tradition began.

Dean Scott Cochran who went to Wofford before Raulerson’s time, graduating in 1988, participated in a few of these traditions.

“My senior year a few of us ‘gained access’ to the tower and climbed up to the bell,” says Cochran. “There was a notebook next to the bell with names of people who had come before us. I don’t know what happened to that book. It would be interesting to see it today. Dr. Philip Stone, Wofford’s archivist, doesn’t have it. It may have been lost or thrown away when the bell was converted to digital.”Students have left their mark in the bell tower for years in the form of notebooks, engravings in the wood, or chalk writings across the walls and even on the bell.

“From the tower we gained access to the roof and sat up on there to star gaze,” says Cochran. “Not a smart thing to do but like a lot of college students, I was very capable of making bad decisions.”

After an unsuccessful attempt to find the eyes of Old Main that night in 1998, Raulerson and Parrish decided to follow in the footsteps of generations before them and make their way up to the bell tower.

“The door was ajar, and if I remember correctly, it was a pitch black squeeze up some stairs into the room that holds the bell. Once there we found a light, one that has a pull chain, but we didn’t turn it on. There was enough light shining in from the outside spotlight to show us that the room was a bit dirty and neglected, rustic, untouched. It was very memorable and exhilarating, from the adrenaline of the experience of seeing a hidden part of Wofford,” says Raulerson. “And sharing a first kiss.”

Back in 1937 before Raulerson and Parrish shared their first kiss, Dr. Lewis P. Jones, then a student at Wofford, snuck into the tower to observe the 700 pound bell and admire the view of campus.

“One rarely notices the bell, yet it is the main regulator of life at Wofford,” he wrote.

Jones was right when he said the bell regulated life at Wofford. Its ring signified the beginning and end of classes as well as other important occasions.

The Bell Ringer Scholarship up until the 1960s was granted to students whose job was to ring the bell.

However, at some points throughout Wofford’s history, this task has been made impossible for these students due to campus pranks. The bell has been the subject of multiple pranks throughout the years including cutting the rope short so that the bell ringer could not reach it or stealing the clapper so that the bell could not ring. Even rivaling colleges would come to steal the clapper from the bell.

The bell was cast by the Meneely Bell Foundry in West Troy, New York. Meneely bells are considered artifacts and are quite valuable today. In 2001, the bell was restored with a digital bell controller, no longer requiring a student to man the bell. A year later on Oct. 22, four years to the date after their first kiss in the tower, Raulerson and Parrish were still dating when they visited their alma mater a few weeks after homecoming.

“I didn’t know my husband was going to ask me to marry him. It was a Wednesday, and we stopped at Old Main on the way home from a date. Remsen had prearranged the engagement scenario with several friends, including Mr. Joe Greenlee (who was the head of Wofford Security) to open the newly renovated bell tower. Another classmate, Adam Brannon, had set up flowers and champagne before we arrived. When we got there, I was so blown away with the renovation and automation of the bell system with the original bell that I didn’t even notice that Remsen was talking about a future together. But he asked, and I accepted, and the rest is history. We haven’t been to the bell tower since,” says Raulerson, now Rebecca Parrish.

To this day, Wofford students still venture to see the 150-year-old bell, though they will not share their stories with you until after they have graduated and are safe from the hands of Campus Safety.

They share the same space where Parrish was engaged, where Jones admired campus, and where countless others have shared important moments of Wofford history, big and small. For Parrish, the bell tower can represent a lot to the Wofford community.

“The Towers have always been a recognized, photographed place, and I do think they represent something bigger. Maybe it is the history, maybe the intrigue. To me it is the history of the building and the structure of the towers—like bookends for the halls and classrooms in between, which have seen generations of students,” says Parrish. “The exterior of the tower is seen by all, but we are among the lucky few that have seen the inside—a hidden gem.