What is the Liberty Bell?

The Liberty Bell is a historic bell located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, originally cast in 1752 for the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) and revered as a symbol of American liberty, particularly because of its biblical inscription "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof" from Leviticus 25:10. The bell was commissioned in 1751 by the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly, which ordered a 2,000 pound bell from Lester and Pack of London (later the Whitechapel Bell Foundry) for the new bell tower of the Pennsylvania State House. The bell was inscribed with the Leviticus quote at the request of Speaker Isaac Norris and arrived in Philadelphia in August 1752.

It cracked on its first test ringing. Two local artisans, John Pass and John Stow, recast the bell twice in 1753, adding more copper to reduce its brittleness, and the recast bell was hung in the State House steeple. The bell rang on numerous occasions during the colonial and revolutionary periods, including most famously to summon the Pennsylvania Assembly to consider the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, although the popular story that it rang on July 4, 1776 is romantic legend rather than documented fact.

After British troops occupied Philadelphia in September 1777, Patriots removed the bell to Allentown to keep it from being melted down for ammunition. It was returned in 1778. The bell developed cracks over the years, and the famous large crack appeared sometime in the early nineteenth century, with the most popular story holding that it cracked while being rung for John Marshall's funeral on July 8, 1835. The bell was repaired with a "stop drilling" technique that produced the current zigzag widening crack visible today. The bell rang for George Washington's birthday on February 23, 1846, but its tone was so impaired by then that it was not regularly rung afterward.

Abolitionists adopted the bell and its inscription as a symbol of the antislavery cause beginning in the 1830s. The name Liberty Bell first appeared in print in an 1835 abolitionist pamphlet. The bell was displayed at world's fairs and on tour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, traveling on flatbed railroad cars across the country.

It now resides in the Liberty Bell Center in Independence National Historical Park, across the street from Independence Hall, where it has been on display since 2003. The bell weighs about 2,080 pounds, is 12 feet around the lip, 7.5 feet around the crown, and 3 feet from lip to crown. About 2 million people visit the Liberty Bell each year.