For Falmouth Heights history buffs, below is an article published by the Falmouth Enterprise. ([Cape News: By KENNETH R. PEAL, Dec 29, 2020]
If anyone has information about the current location of the bell, please notify FHMNA at [email protected].
Have you ever heard the bell at the Union Chapel in Falmouth Heights? It’s a trick question of course, because the chapel was demolished years ago.
When I asked local historian and photographer Donald Fish that question, he went me one better: his father installed the original flooring in the chapel and, ironically, was hired to remove the same flooring just before the building was demolished. Others of us who are less informed would be forgiven for thinking of perhaps the St. Thomas Chapel or Menauhant Chapel or Grace Memorial Chapel. St. Thomas Chapel does not have a bell. Grace Memorial Chapel has a bell but it’s on Central Avenue, not in Falmouth Heights. It was built in 1931 as a replacement for the earlier Menauhant Chapel on the same site.
Union Chapel started as an observatory that was part of a real estate development undertaken in 1870 by some Worcester businessmen before seaside resorts were common. In fact, most of the Falmouth coastline then was occupied with salt works; the town had few tourist amenities. The company, Falmouth Heights Land and Wharf Company, acquired most of the real estate in the Heights and drew up a plan that included house lots, streets, hotels, and parks much like those of a city (Worcester?). Lot sales and building construction were slow initially and the company sold off its rights in 1878, but their plan is pretty much what we see today. Notice street names like Worcester Court, Quinsigamond Avenue, Quinapoxet Avenue, Wachusett Avenue. And Tower House Road was named after Mr. George Tower, one of the Worcester businessmen whose hotel was located where Mariner’s Point Resort is now. Candace Jenkins presents a complete description of this in “The Development of Falmouth as a Summer Resort 1850-1900.”
The observatory, built in 1872, occupied the highest point in Falmouth Heights, with views of Vineyard Sound and beach access for the residents. Over the years it served as a general store, a fruit store, unofficial post office, meeting place, and sightseeing venue. Articles in the Falmouth Enterprise archives tell us that it frequently hosted sales of homemade baked goods and “fancy articles” in support of The Women’s Relief Corps, “the ladies of the ME Church,” and the Ladies Aid Society. Much later (1913), it hosted a meeting of the Women’s Suffrage League.
In 1891, a board of trustees was formed with the purpose of converting the observatory to a chapel—Union Chapel—for nondenominational worship services similar to camp meetings at Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere at the time. The seasonal services featured local and out-of-town preachers as well as organ music and singing, and often required the addition of folding chairs to accommodate the crowds. In 1905, the chapel was enlarged to provide seating for 200, and other improvements, including the addition of a bell given by a “prominent and public-spirited summer resident.” By the end of the season however, we learn that the bell in the chapel “did not prove satisfactory.” I am not sure what the problem could have been or how they broke the news to the public-spirited summer resident. But by the 1906 season a new bell was installed, cast expressly for the chapel by Meneely Bell Company, of Troy, New York. The new bell, which “has a pleasant tone,” bore the inscription: “Union Chapel Association, Falmouth Heights, Mass., 1906. P.D. Cowan, president, A.C. Munroe, Sec-Treas, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism.”
Though the popularity of the chapel continued into the early 1920s, concern was expressed at a meeting of the trustees in 1912, when the death of Mr. Munroe was noted as the loss of a fourth big supporter in a year. Then, when only four trustees attended a 1914 meeting, “additional men were voted to serve on the board.” A trustee meeting in 1920 discussed improvements to the chapel, but an Enterprise article five years later (July 1925) describes an important public meeting where “a number of residents of Falmouth Heights…are interested in removal of the observation tower and chapel which has become an eyesore and a menace to the property in the immediate neighborhood.” The property is described as “sadly neglected…becoming each year more and more dilapidated.”
Another Enterprise article reported that on Christmas Day 1928 “boys broke practically all the glass in the 29 windows” of the chapel. Then in January 1929, we read that the “observatory has stood vacant for many years…is boarded up with paint peeling…situated at the intersection of eight streets ascending the hill, it impedes traffic since the introduction of the automobile.” By this time the stockholders of the original development company and even their heirs were hard to locate and many of the trustees of the chapel had resigned or died.
The warrant for the Falmouth Town Meeting of February 12, 1929, includes article 63: “To see if the town will vote to request the Selectmen to lay out for highway purposes that portion of land at Falmouth Heights known as the Chapel lot and also known as Observatory Hill, and raise and appropriate the sum of $1000, for the purpose of payment for the land, that being the price agreed to by the Trustees, or set or do anything else in this matter, including taking thereof by eminent domain if deemed advisable or necessary.” The article passed.
A side note for local historians: Town Meeting that year was held at the Elizabeth Theatre, where Maxwell & Co. is now.
In a subsequent meeting with selectmen, C.S. Hannaford, trustee of the old chapel, agreed to the town’s taking of the land. He stated that the only other trustee still in office, Mrs. Mabel S. Harris, would concur. Although it had served as a chapel it was not a consecrated building, so demolition was allowed. By August 1929, the Enterprise reported that “Arthur Peterson, contractor, has underway the work of demolishing the old observatory.”
Crown Avenue today surrounds a peaceful green where the chapel once stood. Only a few pictures of the demolition are available, and none show the bell. I have been unable to find evidence that the town took inventory of the building contents before the demolition. The current location of the Meneely bell is unknown.