Did the Liberty Bell actually ring in July 1776? Most say no, but this researcher says yes.

An Alabama writer who loves history, bells, and Philadelphia makes a case in a new book that the Liberty Bell was among those rung during the day and into the night of July 8, 1776.

“There’s more evidence than not that the bell would have rung,” said Thomas Kaufmann, whose Independence Bells of Philadelphia is published by the History Press and includes numerous drawings by the author.

Kaufmann also is manager of special collections/rare books at the Ford Motor Co. Library of Tuskegee University in Alabama.

The bell’s steward, the National Park Service, has concluded “there is no evidence that the bell rang on July 4 or 8″ of 1776.

The National Constitution Center says it “may not have rung on July 8″ because the bell and clock tower at what is now Independence Hall “was under repair.”

And according to the UShistory.org website, “while tradition holds that the Liberty Bell rang out” on July 8 for the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, the tower “was in bad condition and historians today doubt the likelihood of the story.”

But in an interview from his Montgomery, Ala., home, Kaufmann insisted that just because there’s no known record of the Liberty Bell being rung that day doesn’t mean it wasn’t.

The interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.

There is a substantial account in the records of the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly that the bell was being rung so often and so loudly that it irritated local residents, who complained to the assembly with a petition in 1772. According to a 19th-century history of the building by Frank M. Etting, who had been the keeper of the tower, the bell was rung in 1775 to summon people to [Independence Hall] after the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

The accounts of the bell ringing loudly enough to cause complaints could only mean, in my view, that the bell was not attached to the frame or the walls of the tower but was in a wooden frame resting on the floor. It would be rung by pulling a rope and swinging the bell back and forth within the frame.

I’ve been climbing up inside bell towers and clock towers and church steeples since I was 11 years old. I’ve worked in architecture and historic preservation, and I’ve seen towers that looked in worse condition than they actually were. The Independence Hall tower may have looked the worse for wear because it was the first one credited to Edmund Woolley. He built it from 1751 to 1752, and it stood until 1781.

So to the distinguished people who have done lots of research and given lots of thought to the question and feel the bell was not rung on July 8, 1776, I say: I respectfully disagree.

I was about 6 or 7 years old when I saw a photograph in the Cub Scout Handbook of a boy looking up at the inside of the Liberty Bell. Later when I read about the bell, I was so struck by it ... and by that time I already had become fascinated by church bells. But I never saw the Liberty Bell in person until after I’d written my first book, Historic Alabama Bells, and visited Philadelphia in 2020.

Before I answer I want to give tremendous credit to Karie Diethorn, chief curator with the National Park Service, for arranging to take me into the Liberty Bell Center so I could have time with the bell before the crowd came. I had thought about this bell, read about it, seen pictures of it, and wondered about it all my life, and there it was. I was just in such awe. I thought of all the hands that have touched it.

All of the people I met, including at the Apple Hostel and Sonny’s Famous Steaks, sealed the deal for me on my kindredness with and love for Philadelphia. And all of the resources in Philadelphia about the city and its Revolutionary War history were so helpful to me! The Library Company, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, all of the archivists, church historians. And this resource — Philadelphia Congregations Early Records — was indispensable!

The book is about not only the Liberty Bell but the many other “independence bells” of early Philadelphia, and most of them were church bells, such as those at Christ Church. It was only after climbing up into the tower of Christ Church to behold the beautiful bells within that I realized [they] looked like what the Liberty Bell looked like before it was recast.

I read histories of the churches themselves, handwritten, to discover the details. ... I read an account from 1750 in the old British cursive, going over hundreds of pages, looking for some mention of a bell or a steeple, and there it was. Like finding gold.

I believe bells are providential. They are ordained by God. And as created, fabricated objects, they are magnificent.

Bells are understood by everyone, whether as a call to worship or a call to arms, in celebration for a wedding or tolling for a funeral. Bells can bring healing as well.

The emotion of the moment is expressed in the ringing of a bell, or bells. When they rang in Philadelphia on July 8, 1776, they rang in jubilation, exhilaration, and freedom.