Bells chiming the time on Culver’s campus have been music to students’ ears for more than seven decades

One aspect of Culver that many graduates report missing after they leave the campus — and there are many — is not just the beautiful sights, but perhaps unexpectedly, the sounds as well. Particularly the seemingly omnipresent sound of bells chiming out the hours (and portions of hours) and even the school's musical anthems like "The Culver Song" and "Culver Daughters Sing Thy Praise."

The bells, of course, reside in the tower of Culver's beautiful Memorial Chapel, which was dedicated 74 years ago this month, over the weekend of Oct. 20-21, 1951, the culmination of fundraising which began as World War II raged and the names of the more than 200 Culver graduates who lost their lives in that conflict had begun to pour in. 

Prior to the chapel, construction of nearly all of Culver's buildings had been funded entirely by the Culver family. The last of those family-funded structures was the Naval Building in 1948, followed the next year by Beason Hall, whose benefactors were Hamilton "Ross" and Elvera Beason in honor of their son,  Ross Jr. '39, who died in World War II. Both of those buildings and the chapel were designed by renowned Dartmouth architect-in-residence Jens Fredrick Larson, who had first been selected to design the chapel, even before the war ended in 1945. 

It might seem odd that Culver, where Sunday chapel services were mandatory from the school's opening in 1894, was a school without a chapel. Church services prior to the construction of Memorial Chapel were usually held where virtually every indoor gathering of any size was held at Culver then: in the Recreation Building. 

Interestingly, the school did have a bell to chime out the hours in the years before 1951. 

In 1927, the Mess Hall — today's Lay Dining Center — which had been completed 16 years earlier, saw a new addition thanks to that year's graduating class gift: a clock added to the building's southeastern tower with a 1,000-pound bell forged at the Seth Thomas foundry. Christmas carols were even played from the tower on a smaller set of bells during the weeks leading up to the holiday break, prior to the construction of the chapel. 

And the old Mess Hall bell hasn't been entirely silenced, even if it was for several years following 1951. Since the opening of the current Woodcraft Camp site in 1963, the old bell has served as the reveille bell for the camp, today from its location atop the Woodcraft amphitheater. 

As design work toward the chapel continued, there emerged two unique and notable forms of musical instrumentation designed as part of the building itself: the splendid, 3,333-pipe organ, built by the renowned M.P Möller Company of Maryland, and the 51-bell carillon located in the chapel tower.