Old school bell touches Clovis Unified history

For decades, a century-old piece of history gathered dust in the garage of a house in northeast Fresno, waiting to be rediscovered.

Until a few months ago, members of the Mesple family didn’t know they still had the 100-year bell from the old Lincoln Elementary School, which was destroyed by fire on Oct. 29, 1944.

Madeleine Mesple, 86, said her late husband, Henry, and his brother Ivan stored the bell. Her son, Paul Mesple, said: “They figured they would set it somewhere thinking they would do something with it later.”

It took 65 years, but later has finally come for the 24-inch-wide, nearly 400-pound cast-iron bell.

The Mesple family has donated the bell to Clovis Unified School District. School trustees will honor the family tonight.

Employees are cleaning up the bell, and a monument will be built for it. It no longer rings since being damaged in the fire, which caused it to fall. After the fire, the bell had a small crack, Paul Mesple said.

Ivan Mesple saved the bell as a memento of Lincoln Elementary School, which was built in 1909 near what is now First Street and Alluvial Avenue. Both he and his brother had served as school board members.

“I didn’t find it until I went in the garage to look for something,” said Madeleine Mesple, who owns the home where the bell was found.

After the fire, “They were trying to keep it from going to the junkyard for scrap,” she said. “Nobody had the heart for that.”

The 1944 fire was caused by faulty wiring because pennies had been substituted for burned-out fuses, a story in The Fresno Bee recounted.

The value of the destroyed school — which had one classroom and four smaller rooms — was $2,500, according to the newspaper article. When Clovis Unified rebuilt the school at First Street and Alluvial Avenue in the early 1980s, its price tag was $1.9 million.

After Lincoln burned down, students went to Fort Washington Elementary School, near Friant and Copper avenues. Fort Washington was a separate district at the time. In 1945, the two districts merged to form the Lincoln-Fort Washington Union District. The Lincoln-Fort Washington district along with a handful of others became part of Clovis Unified in 1960 to create what resembles the Clovis district of today.

Lincoln school had kindergarten through eighth grades. It was originally a one-room schoolhouse and was later partitioned into two rooms.

“The teacher would pull a rope to ring the bell at the back of the first- and fourth-grade room,” said Jim Parisi of Clovis, a 1935 graduate of Lincoln Elementary.

He said the bell would alert students that they were late returning to class. It could be heard from a mile away.

A common recollection of the school was its pesky woodpeckers, who would peck away at trees or make noise in the schoolhouse eaves during school hours.

“There were holes all around the building,” said Parisi, a retired foreman iron worker. “While we were studying, you would hear tap, tap, tap, tap.”

For a 1966 Lincoln reunion, Charles Garrigus, California’s poet laureate, wrote a poem called “Salute to the Old Woodpecker School.”

In 1983, Clovis Unified built a new Lincoln Elementary School. By that time, both Henry and Ivan Mesple had died.

The family also saved a Maypole from the school. It’s stored in a backyard of one of the family’s houses. The family offered the pole to the school district, Paul Mesple said, but officials were not interested because they had no use for it.

But district officials were interested in the bell. It will be cleaned and become the centerpiece for a memorial to the old school.

“They are looking at mounting it on a pedestal and want to keep the historical element and feel of the bell,” said Kelly Avants, district spokeswoman. “It will get a mild cleaning that will not damage it.”

Lincoln Elementary School Principal Roann Carpenter said she has talked to architects about installing the bell on a base at the front of the school.

“To see something that is historical like that is like going back in time and touching history,” she said.

By Marc Benjamin / The Fresno Bee