Name/Title
Bell PullContext
Hanging by the bed in the upstairs Cochran Girls' Bedroom is a 20th-century needlepoint bell pull backed with velvet and finished with brass escutcheons on either end. This bell pull was made by Vermeille Sears Smith (1891-1990), wife of oilman Erwin W. Smith. Later in life, Vermeille married noted landscape designer, C.C. "Pat" Fleming, who worked with Ima Hogg to design the layout of Houston's Bayou Bend. Pat Fleming is the uncle of Joe Pinnelli, who has done extensive restoration work at the Neill-Cochran House Museum and is currently restoring the NCHM Slave Quarters.
House bells, or call bells, were common in upper-class homes of England and America from the late 1700s to the late 1800s. They allowed instant communication between the family of the house and the servants, and in the American South, between slave owners and the enslaved. A pull of the bell pull engaged a series of wall-mounted wires and cranks that would sound a bell near the servants' or slave quarters. There was often a bank of bells, with each bell sounded by a distinct bell pull.
House bells had a profound effect on the relationship between the family of the house and the servants or slaves. Staff no longer had to wait at the threshold to hear a master's call. Much of the "upstairs/downstairs" relationship that we now associate with the British gentry of the Victorian Era was made possible by the advent of the house bell.
In the American South, house bells were placed not by the servants' quarters downstairs, but on the exterior of the house near the slave quarters. Mount Vernon and Monticello had house bell systems, as did the White House. As young boys, Tad and Willy Lincoln climbed into the attic of the White House and pulled all the wires at once, setting off a clangor of bells at the servants' quarters that sent the staff into a panic.
House bells were made obsolete by electric bells, intercoms, and the telephone. Today, it is very rare to find an intact house bell system. It is unknown whether such a system ever existed at the Neill-Cochran House Museum, but the bell pull in the Girls' Bedroom (acquired in 2023) gives us an idea of how such a pull might have looked.
You can see this bell pull, and all of our resonant artifacts, during opening hours, Wed-Sun, 11-4pm.
Source:
Madill, Wendy Danielle; "Noiseless, Automatic Service: The History of Domestic Servant Call Bell Systems in Charleston, South Carolina, 1740-1900."