Audin Rhodes/MDN From left are Marilyn and Dale Niewoehner in front of the Henry A. Niewoehner Memorial Bell Tower in Rugby on Sept. 24.

On Sunday, Oct. 17, 1999, at 1 p.m., a dedication ceremony was held for the newly constructed Henry A. Niewoehner Memorial Bell Tower in Rugby, and now 25 years later, the tower still proudly rings its bells for the Rugby community.

The story of the Niewoehner Bell Tower actually begins back about 65 years ago.

“About 1959, we got a bell from my mother’s rural schoolhouse,” said Dale Niewoehner, creator of the Niewoehner Memorial Bell Tower.

Niewoehner grew up in Upham, but has lived in Rugby for the past 51 years. His father, Henry A. Niewoehner, built a rock foundation/cairn to mount the schoolhouse bell on shortly after he acquired it.

The bell was from a two-story rural schoolhouse south of Upham in Layton Township and the schoolhouse was torn down shortly after Niewoehner’s father acquired the bell. Niewoehner was in the eighth grade at the time.

“Then at about the same time, I bought a Great Northern steam locomotive bell from a steam locomotive,” Niewoehner said.

During that time there were around 12-20 locomotives that were waiting to be scrapped in Grand Forks when Niewoehner acquired one of the locomotive bells.

“My brother, who was living in Grand Forks at the time, discovered that items could be purchased off of these locomotives and so he and I both bought bells,” he said.

The Upham area schoolhouse bell and the locomotive bells were the beginning catalysts for the bell tower. Then in the early 1990s, Niewoehner started looking for other bells in the region and was able to find and acquire an impressive number of them.

“I think it’s important to remember the history of the communities these bells are originally from,” Niewoehner said. Most of the bells originate a mere 30 to 50 miles away from where the tower stands now.

“Rather than somebody buying them and them ending up in Minneapolis or wherever, we’re going to keep them here in North Dakota where they were in use,” Niewoehner said.

Nearly all of the bells come from regional churches and schoolhouses, save for the locomotive bell and a historic Rugby bell.

“One of the bells is also the original city of Rugby bell that was the fire alarm many years ago. I found it in a city storage building, but it used to be mounted on a tower behind city hall and it was rung when there was a fire,” Niewoehner said.

The bells were originally erected around the parking lot of the funeral home Niewoehner owns and operates.

“In ’97 or ’98 we realized we needed to do something with these bells. So at that time, we decided then to build this tower,” Niewoehner said.

In 1998, Niewoehner employed Jim Wiggins and Tim Estes of a local Rugby welding business to build a 30-foot tall tower out of steel to house the bells. The bells were then placed inside the tower in the spring of 1999 and the planning for the dedication ceremony was then underway.

“Senator Kent Conrad was our keynote speaker,” Niewoehner said of the dedication ceremony. “We dedicated the bell tower in memory of my father who had died a couple years before that.”

According to an article published by The Pierce County Tribune on Oct. 23, 1999, former North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad had spoken kindly of Niewoehner’s father at the dedication ceremony.

“Henry Niewoehner would be remembered even without a tower,” said Conrad in the article. “Whether times were good or bad, he always found ways to help others. He was someone you could count on.”

Niewoehner’s father had passed away before the bell tower was constructed but Niewoehner’s brother, H. Weyburn Niewoehner, was able to see it in its completion and attend the dedication ceremony among countless community and area residents.

Niewoehner’s brother has since passed away but the memory of that day lives on.

“Everybody was supportive,” Niewoehner said. “We had a nice turnout for the dedication. I think we had 150 people show up.”

Guests were provided with tiny bells as mementos of the occasion and they rang their bells in greeting to Conrad before his keynote address.

Conrad also rang the bell tower bells that day alongside Niewoehner’s wife, Marilyn, and several other community members attending the ceremony.

“And since that time, we’ve had countless tourists that stop and want to look at it or ring the bells,” Niewoehner said.

There are a total of 16 bells in the tower and townsfolk can hear them ring for several blocks. The bells are rung by pulling on individual cables for each bell.

“They range from 40 inches in diameter to probably about 18 or 14 inches in diameter,” Niewoehner said. “With the tower and the bells, it weighs about eight tons.”

All of the bells on the tower are cast steel alloy and are not made of expensive bronze like most bells are today.

“These are basically cheap bells,” Niewoehner said. “They were minimally priced bells when these churches and schools bought them. I suppose they paid maybe $50 to $100 for them back in the early part of the 20th century.”

Although the bells were initially cheap for the churches and schools to purchase, their value to Rugby and the surrounding area’s preserved history is priceless.

These historic bells even inspired a composer to write music about them.

“We had a young man in town here who was a music teacher and also a composer and he wrote a melody about them,” Niewoehner said.

The composer was David Halvorson, who formerly taught music in Rugby but now teaches in Tioga.

According to Niewoehner, Halvorson has several published pieces of music to his name and one of the pieces he wrote was specifically for the Niewoehner Memorial Bell Tower.

“He attributed notes to each bell and then he wrote this melody,” Niewoehner said.

The song Halvorson wrote was both lovely and complex and took around six to eight people pulling the cables for the bells in order to properly play the tune.

“We did it a couple of times,” Niewoehner said.

Niewoehner’s favorite bell to ring is the bell at the very top of the tower, which originally belonged to the Brinsmade Presbyterian Church in Brinsmade. The bell is 40 inches in diameter and is made out of steel alloy, weighing in at 1,300 pounds.

“That’s the one I ring the most,” he said. “It has a very nice note to it.”

Each bell has a story and a history that Niewoehner has collected into a small book he wrote many years ago. Niewoehner still has copies available for sale for those curious about the history of each bell.

The bells were designed for outdoor weather and so North Dakota winters do not impact them too much aside from the occasional need to brush snow off of them. Likewise winds have yet to damage the tower or bells.

“It would take a tremendous wind to even ring the bell. I hope we don’t ever have a wind like that,” Niewoehner said. Even on the windiest of days the bells remain still thanks to their sheer size and weight, meaning manual cable pulling is the only way to make them ring.

“About the only thing we have to do is grease the spindles once in a while. But other than that, there’s no maintenance,” Niewoehner said.

Although the tower was originally constructed as a memorial to Niewoehner’s father and as a proud display of history, it is now a tourist attraction in Rugby perhaps because of those previously mentioned attributes.

The bell tower is listed in tourist books and on websites and blogs about sites to see in North Dakota, which Niewoehner believes can only benefit the Rugby community as a whole.

“When any tourist comes to town, they spend money at other places and get food and gasoline and hotels and all kinds of things,” Niewoehner said. “So anything we can do to bring people to town is better.”

Tourists can ring the bells if they ask for permission beforehand, because the bell tower is on Niewoehner’s private property.

The bells can also be heard ringing on significant days in American history, such as on Sept. 11, Memorial Day and Veterans Day as well as on holidays such as Christmas and New Year’s.