Liberty Bell Center

The Liberty Bell was cast in London at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1752 and shipped to Philadelphia for the Pennsylvania State House — the building now known as Independence Hall. It cracked on its first test ring, was recast twice by Philadelphia craftsmen John Pass and John Stow, and hung in the State House steeple for decades, rung for public announcements, legislative sessions, and civic ceremonies. Its inscription, drawn from Leviticus 25:10, reads: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants Thereof.”

The bell’s most famous crack — the one visible today — developed sometime in the nineteenth century, likely around 1846, when attempts to repair an earlier fissure by widening the crack to prevent metal fatigue instead made the bell permanently unringable. By that time the bell had already been adopted by abolitionists as a symbol. Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society publications in the 1830s were among the first to call it the “Liberty Bell,” and the name — along with the bell’s image — appeared widely in antislavery literature long before it became the patriotic symbol of Independence Day tradition.

The bell was moved from various locations in and around Independence Hall over the years before settling in its current purpose-built home, the Liberty Bell Center, which opened in 2003 adjacent to Independence Hall. The glass-walled pavilion allows visitors to see the bell up close and frames it against the backdrop of Independence Hall through the rear windows — a deliberate design choice connecting the physical object to the building it came from.