The Justice Bell’s Visit to Wayne County: 1915 and Today

The Justice Bell in 1915

On August 18, 1915, the autotruck carrying the Justice Bell broke down in Susquehanna County. While the truck was being repaired, the suffragists continued without it, traveling to towns in Wayne and Pike Counties. Although attendees were disappointed by the Justice Bell’s absence, large crowds still gathered to hear the speeches. To make up for the missing bell, the suffragists put extra effort into engaging the audiences and raising much-needed funds through the sale of bell souvenirs. On August 20, the repaired truck with the Justice Bell rejoined the suffrage caravan as it entered Pike County. They reached southeastern Wayne County the following day, where Louise Hall delivered a speech. That evening, local suffragists escorted the bell back across the county line to Milford, in Pike County.

The Wayne Independent reported on August 24, 1915:
Bell Party Tours Southern Wayne: Outbursts of Oratory and Applause Along Route
“The disabled Liberty Bell truck in a Susquehanna garage and the delayed parts necessary for its repair and operation caused great disappointment along the route where the appearance of the bell was scheduled in southern Wayne County. On Friday, the bell party comprising Miss Louise Hall, Miss Elizabeth McShane, both Vassar college graduates and sent out by the Pennsylvania State Woman Suffrage Association….Miss Louise Hall spoke for an hour and twenty minutes to a crowd of several hundred people in front of the bank building and made one of her most telling efforts in this the biggest and best meeting of the whole campaign in Wayne. The bell arrived in Hawley on Saturday [August 21] where it was met and escorted into Milford by Mesdames Van Etten, Wolfe and Eddington of that borough.”

Suffragist Spotlight
Louise Hall

Louise Hall was already a veteran of the movement when she became director of the Justice Bell tour and one of its most popular speakers. A 1903 graduate of Vassar College, she taught at private girls’ schools before moving to New York City to work in the settlement houses, where she was radicalized through her contact with women and children living in poverty. In 1910, she became active in suffrage work in Massachusetts, and by 1912, she was organizing in Rhode Island and Ohio. The Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association (PWSA) hired her in 1913 as its full-time executive secretary and, a year later, as organizing secretary.

Hall traveled with the Justice Bell tour from its launch in Sayre, Pennsylvania, on June 23, 1915, until October 12, when she was dispatched from Lebanon County to Philadelphia and then to several other locations to assist with last-minute campaigning ahead of the November 2 election.

She was described in multiple newspapers as an especially gifted speaker. One account from July 29, 1915, called her one of the best suffrage campaign speakers in the country. “Her introductory speeches make the justice of the suffrage cause so clear that the message of the chained and silent bell arouses an irresistible determination in the audiences to see that the women of Pennsylvania get the justice of enfranchisement and are enabled to unchain their Bell and proclaim that fact.”

After the Pennsylvania campaign, Hall continued her suffrage work, organizing in New York, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. In 1918, she accepted a position with the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, their first female employee. After fifteen years as supervisor of the women’s department at MassMutual in Boston, she moved to England with her life partner, Ethel Bret Harte, daughter of the well-known novelist and poet Bret Harte. A year later, they drove across the United States and, in 1934, settled in Ojai, California, where both would spend the rest of their lives.


Returning in 2026

More than a century after the Justice Bell Tour, I traveled to Wayne County on June 6, 2026, at the invitation of the Wayne County Historical Society. Over the past several years, I have been in contact with numerous historical societies as I have hunted for information related to the 1915 Justice Bell tour, and have received generous assistance in locating undigitized articles. Bernadine Lennon, director of the Greene-Dreher Historical Society in Wayne County, and I first connected several years ago when I was searching for undigitized information about the Justice Bell’s tour through Wayne and Pike Counties. She was able to locate newspapers that recorded the bell’s travel through both counties. When she heard about our 2026 Tour, she connected me with Kelly Alogna of the Wayne County Historical Society.

During my drive to the event location at Canal Park in Hawley, I thought of the women and their bell as they traversed these forested mountain roads, some of them quite steep. I passed through the town of Hawley, an incredibly picturesque community, and thought of the Justice Bell’s arrival there on August 21, 1915.

My event at Canal Park, just down the road from Hawley's main street, took place on an actual canal boat. Kelly Alogna had thought of everything for a film screening. There was a basket filled with adorable small bells, lemonade, water, and popcorn. A large, appreciative audience that included board members of the Wayne County Historical Society, local residents, and even Hawley's mayor had many questions after the film, and we had an invigorating discussion. The story of the Justice Bell is so fascinating that they were as astonished as I was when I first learned of it, wondering why they had never heard about this dramatic chapter of Pennsylvania's history.

After a lovely dinner with Bernadine Lennon and her husband, Jon, the skies opened up just as I prepared to drive back to my hotel, which was about fifteen minutes away. Jon offered to guide me through the thunderstorm. Gripping the steering wheel and with my nose glued to the windshield, I could see little but the taillights of his pickup and thought again of the suffragists during their tour, when rain accompanied so much of their journey. And they were in an open autotruck wearing long dresses! I’ll finish this post with a quote from later in the tour from a Reading Times report on October 16, 1915:

“Through rain and mud, the Woman’s Liberty Bell came into the northern part of Montgomery County . . . . It rained while the addresses were being made in the Square at Pennsburg last night, and it came down in torrents in the afternoon. But the campaigners have made an inexorable rule not to postpone a meeting or cut out a stopping place on account of the weather, and they have kept faithfully to their schedule through the rain and heat and mud and the adverse weather conditions of the summer. So, when clouds broke and the rain came down, they simply hauled in their yellow flags, furled the red, white, and blue, let down the flaps of the auto truck, and went along the road like gypsies in a caravan.”

A special note: The Justice Bell: Tracing the Journey of a Forgotten Symbol now has full distribution and is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, other online retailers, and local bookstores.

I will continue to bring autographed copies to our events, but feel free to order a copy in advance and bring it with you. I would be happy to autograph it.


Continue the Journey

Our next stop is in Lackawanna County on June 8, 2026, where an event sponsored by the Lackawanna County Historical Society and the Scranton Area Community Foundation is planned at the Century Club in Scranton.

Follow the 2026 Justice Bell Tour

Learn more about the tour on our website.

• View the Justice Bell Foundation tour page

• See the full schedule of events

• Learn more about the documentary Finding Justice: The Untold Story of Women’s Fight for the Vote

• Read the book The Justice Bell: Tracing the Journey of a Forgotten Symbol

Join us as we continue to follow the path of the Justice Bell and explore the remarkable history it represents in Pennsylvania’s fight for women’s suffrage.

Sign up to follow our blog here, and we'll notify you when a new post is published.