Did you hear the St. Aidan’s Freedom Bell ring?

Typically St. Aidan’s Freedom Bell is rung to call parishioners to service, every Sunday at 10 am.

The Freedom Bell

The St. Aidan's bell was donated by the Waldron Family about 2012.

Saint Aidan’s church bell came from the Anthony McGill antebellum plantation in Lenoxburg, Kentucky, where it called hands from the field. Just prior to the Civil War, Baptist Abolishionists held a tent revival nearby, at which Anthony attended and became a Christian that day. He informed his wife that, as Christians, they could no longer own slaves, and he immediately freed them. The bell then became known as The Freedom Bell. The two youngest freedmen, John and his wife, wanted to remain on the plantation. So they became free share croppers owning a portion of what they grew. There, they lived out their lives and John died at the age of ninety nine.

Anthony, as a committed Christian, donated a parcel of land and helped build the First Baptist Church of Lenoxberg, which today is the Cemetery Chapel Christian Church. After he passed, the bell remained in the McGill family. Years later, just before it was to be shipped to Malibu, the town was nearly destroyed by a flood. The bell remained inundated by tons of water and mud for weeks.

Once it arrived arrived in Malibu, Don McCrea laboriously restored the bell from almost two centuries of corrosion. He then designed a metal yoke and built a standing post on which it stands today. Finally, Don and Anthony McGill’s great, great, great grandson, Jamie McGill Waldron, hung the bell in place.

The “Freedom Bell” rings again calling Saint Aidan’s faithful to worship.    

McCrea Bell

St. Aidan’s also has a second bell hand-crafted and donated by Don McCrea.