The Bell Tower and Old Main

Can you believe the right side of the entrance doors to these County offices was once the exact site of the iconic Furman Bell Tower?

“Old Main” was first put to use in 1854 by the students and faculty of Furman University. It was designed by Charleston architects Jones and Lee in the Italianate Revival style. This style was modeled on the 16th century Italian Renaissance buildings of Florence; this architecture was a global trend, as seen in the Osborn House on Isle of Wright in England (built 1845-1851), or more locally, at Old Main at Wofford (designed by the same architects as Furman's and completed on the same schedule, 1851-1854). Columns, round arches, and balustrades are similar between the two, but while Wofford's mimicked standard building design, Furman's wrought iron railings and loggias even more clearly resembled the Italianate ideals.

This building, along with the original Bell Tower, was built by slaves and black freedmen, since the “white workmen has been unreliable” (Bainbridge). The recent Seeking Abraham report of Furman goes into great detail about the pay for this work and beliefs of the school's founders about slavery. Suffice it to say here that though they thought slavery an "evil" in Christianity, they found it practical (economical) and unavoidable, and thus went to the utmost lengths to defend and perpetuate enslavement--even owning slaves themselves and preaching its sanctioning by God as a Biblically-justified practice.

We can imagine that inside Old Main, too, such views were taught, as Moral Philosophy and History courses were primary material here (Reid). It remained an important symbol of Furman University and was renamed Richard Furman Hall in 1921.

When the university moved to its new campus in the late 1950s, the fate of Richard Furman Hall was the center of debate. The school knew it needed to sell much of the old land to pay for the immense new campus and construction near Travelers Rest. Still, administration had hoped to use this one historic building as a night school. Without a vision for how to make this work, they decided to dismantle the bricks to recreate a tower on the new campus's lake. Unfortunately again, a lack of planning showed when the bricks (slave made from the nearby clay of the river) were not strong enough for this use. In the winter of 1964 a fire burned down the remains of Old Main (Reid).

While the original building complex did not survive, the bells did and were transferred to a perfect replica of the Bell Tower, which now stands on Furman's lake. Obviously one difference is that the original was connected to the building, and in this version, the exposed face is copied on all four sides, so that the current Bell Tower exists alone on its peninsula on Furman's Swan Lake.

The Bell Tower at Furman's campus holds the third complete set of bells, purchased from the Van Bergen family just like the set before (whose foundries were in the Netherlands). This third set of bells was first installed in the Bell Tower on the old campus in 1909 (as discovered in an audio interview with John Plyler, Jr.).

As recorded in a dedicatory program for the The Burnside Carillon, there were 60 bells, which meant that at the time of its installment, it was the largest Carillon in the South. “The bells within the tower were composed of 80 percent Copper and 20 percent block tin, and ranged in size from 10 inches in diameter to five feet. The largest bell in the tower weighed 4,500 pounds.”

Perhaps the most interesting historical fact about the old bells and Bell Tower was their link to the Civil War. James C. Furman, son of the namesake of the university and ardent pro-slavery figure and secessionist, closed the university during the war. Yet he allowed men to climb into the tower after any Confederate victory and ring the bells. This became a tradition, so that even after athletic victories, students would ring the bells in the tower to symbolize a win. Clemson students even stole bells, a theft against Furman's winning football program (which you'll hear about next), making it so they wouldn't have to hear the victory bells.

Sources Used:

John Plyler, Interview with Jack Sheils. The Woodlands. September 30, 2018.

“The Burnside Carillon.” Program from 1966. Special Collections of Furman University

Alfred S. Reid, ​Furman University: toward a New Identity, 1925-1975​. Duke University Press, 1976.

Judith Bainbridge, “Furmans Two Towers Encompass Much History.” ​The Greenville News,​ 4 Apr. 2005.

Robert Norman Daniel, ​Furman University, A History.​ Furman University, 1951.