For Star subscribers: The bells that have rung out over the mission near Tucson for more than 200 years were recently taken down and treated in hopes of keeping them ringing for decades to come.
Henry Brean For almost as long as San Xavier has been standing, its bells have rung out to announce the passing of people connected to the mission.
Harvey is one of eight conservators brought together by Patronato San Xavier, the nonprofit that oversees preservation and fundraising for the late-17th-century church. The multidisciplinary team spent the past two years painstakingly cleaning and restoring the mission’s four oldest bells.“Bells are critical to a mission,” said Patronato board member Nancy Odegaard, who led the restoration project. “The instrument has to function.
The bells also sound on special occasions, like the election of a new Pope or the feast days in early October and early December for Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Francis Xavier. Then it’s all of the bells at once, sometimes for 10 or 15 minutes straight. “We're currently studying them to see if we can learn anything more about their history and provenance,” said Starr Herr-Cardillo, Patronato’s conservation project manager. “It's a part of the site's history that hasn't really been examined closely until now.”
Each of the bells was brushed clean and then scrubbed with a special blend of mild detergent to remove dust and “bird stuff,” Odegaard said. The team settled on the wax treatment after trying out a dozen different coatings in the lab using pieces of brass. The process took about two months and involved a special chamber in the Engineering Department at the U of A that can mimic and accelerate the effects of weather, temperature and sunlight.
That rings a bellThe conservators made one surprising discovery during their work: Each of the bells has its own name. One is the San Juan Bautista bell, another is the San Pedro, another the San Augustin. Historic photographs appear to show it hanging above the mortuary chapel at San Xavier in the early 1900s.
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