It was a cold, grim morning as I set out across campus in the direction of Withers Hall last Thursday.

Between the gray blanket of clouds that hid the daylight and the classes canceled for fear of icy conditions, it seemed much earlier than it was. At 9 a.m., campus was silent except for the dim pattering of cold rain drops and the drone of empty Wolfline buses lumbering along their routes.

I was there to meet Matt Robbins, a graduate student in architecture who has spent the last few years researching the architectural history of N.C. State for his master’s thesis. He said he had something to show me.

From the fourth floor, we climbed to the roof of the building, returning again to the frigid 30 degree temperatures.

But something there looked like it didn’t belong.

Before us on the flat roof was a raised platform that supported a cupola of simple, boxy construction, with vertical white-washed beams surrounding the perimeter. Inside the cupola was a bell wider than me, tinged dark and dull with age.

Inside its cage-like enclosure, the bell seemed sentenced to silence.

For more than 50 years, the bell has sat on top of Withers Hall, without explanation or attention, barely making a sound.

The mystery of the bell has intrigued Robbins for a while, and for the last few years, he’s spent time between his thesis and class work researching its origin. Last week, he made a breakthrough, and he says he’s close to determining the entire history of not just this bell, but another one with a history just as obscure.

We climbed the platform’s cold metal ladder for a closer look.

An ‘anomaly’ Robbins first noticed the bell about three years ago as he walked along the outer edges of the Court of North Carolina toward the 1911 building. The enclosure is clearly visible from the ground, and he hadn’t come across anything in his research to suggest where it came from.

“At that point I got so interested in it that I went up to take pictures,” Robbins said.

His intention was to trace the bell’s origins and include it in his research, but he ran into problems. He couldn’t find many references to any bell at all, aside from one article in the Technician and another in the alumni magazine. Both were dated Oct. 4, 1935.

They covered the story of the University obtaining a bell that was once aboard the armored cruiser USS North Carolina.

According to the Technician, the administration planned to “install it in a central and appropriate location” to replace the “detested whistle” on Riddick Stadium, which at that time signaled class changes.

Robbins said he assumed that the bell on Withers was simply the bell from the USS North Carolina. But it didn’t seem quite right.

“That never added up to me,” Robbins said.

For one, the dimensions specified in the Technician article didn’t seem to match. Also, what Robbins had seen of the bell didn’t say anything about the cruiser. The only text he saw on the bell was “Baltimore. Md. 1870,” the word “Metropolitan” and the foundry name: Joshua Regester & Sons.

So he put the project aside and didn’t get back to it until September 2007, when he decided he would give it another examination. He said it was a frustrating process that required a lot of digging into University archives.

“None of these people are around anymore,” Robbins said. “All I had were these loose ends that were never tied.”

He didn’t uncover much at all about the bell.

He said he was slowly coming to the conclusion that the Withers Hall bell and the relic from the USS North Carolina were not the same at all. He said that hunch grew more solid after he spoke with an official from the University’s ROTC program. It was there he found out that bells aren’t often gifted and usually end up back with the battleship that holds the name.

“It was an anomaly in all my research because it was lost,” Robbins said.

So he came up with a theory.

Keeping in mind the propaganda of the 1930s and 40s, Robbins postulated that the University had fibbed, telling its community of faculty, staff and students that it had procured the bell, hoping to raise support for the country and its armed services. The bell he thought, never made it to campus.

“Since there was no trace of anything, I thought the bell up there was one they put in place of the USS North Carolina bell to raise the morale of the troops,” Robbins said.

That still left the question of where the actual bell on top of Withers originated.

But a little more than a week ago, Robbins said he found what he thought was the University’s substitute. After searching Google, Robbins uncovered a photo of what looked very much like the bell on the Web site of a former firefighter and N.C. State alumnus.

It depicted a group of firefighters gazing at a bell on the ground. The bell in the photo had a chip on the bottom and only the words “& Son” — presumably part of the bell foundry name — were visible on the surface.

According to a March 9, 1938, article from The Raleigh Times, this bell was removed during the demolition of the bell tower on the Morgan Street fire station to make way for an addition to the revenue building. Before that, the bell had hung in Raleigh’s Metropolitan Hall, “for many years the center of Raleigh’s civic activities,” the article said. In 1914, the hall was torn down and bell moved to the fire station.

The article also mentioned that the bell may be used for some purpose yet to be determined.

“I thought, ‘It’s the real bell, the one from Raleigh,'” Robbins said.

Robbins said he thought he was close to revealing not only the origins of the bell, but of another aspect of the University’s history. But he had to be sure.

Revelation Climbing into the cupola on top of Withers Hall is a tight fit. The bell is large, and between that and its mount, there’s little room left to maneuver.

But on that cold morning last Thursday, Robbins jumped right in.

He points to the lettering on the bell and tells me to take note of it. In my black notebook, I write down “Balt. Md 1870” and “Metropolitan.” That means the bell was cast in Baltimore in 1870, 38 years before the christening of the USS North Carolina.

Robbins scampers to the backside of the bell, pulling out his iPhone to snap a few quick pictures.

“Shit!” he yelled. “The name is on the bell! This proves everything.”

Right where he’s pointing sits the foundry’s name at the top of the bell — “Joshua Regester & Sons.” It sits in clear relief on the surface.

But there’s something else that catches his eye. At the bottom of the bell, a shallow, ragged chip is gouged out of the surface.

“There’s the chip,” he said, running his hand over it. “I recognize that chip.”

These two observations, the chip and the foundry name, were a clear match to the picture of the Raleigh firefighters looking solemnly down at their beloved bell. Robbins said the foundry name is hard to make out in the photo — the chip however, clearly visible on the lip, is not. He had found his bell.

But the question that still remained for Robbins was whether the University had lied about it.

Revealing rumors In an interview last week, Robbins said he was sure that his theory panned out.

But there was a problem. Robbins couldn’t find any specific claim by the University that the bell on top of Withers Hall was the bell from the USS North Carolina. There was no hard evidence that the University had simply invented their acquisition of one bell and substituted another.

I asked Robbins a few questions along those lines. What if the University had acquired both bells? What if they were completely unrelated?

These were questions he said he simply couldn’t answer. Not until a few hours later anyway.

After the interview, Robbins had tracked down the number for the Battleship North Carolina Memorial Museum in Wilmington. He spoke to Kim Sincox, museum services director, who told him that they actually had the bell from the cruiser USS North Carolina.

But something about Robbins’ research jogged her memory.

“I remembered a rumor,” Sincox said in a phone interview Tuesday. “I heard it was underneath a stadium. I thought that it was just a rumor.”

It wasn’t.

That stadium was Riddick Stadium, the former home of Wolfpack football before Carter-Finley Stadium was constructed in 1966. After Robbins’ phone call, Sincox found that the battleship museum received the bell in April 1962 after it was found in a room under the stadium bleachers.

“That was the first time I ever believed the bell had been here,” Robbins said.

That meant that two bells, one from the USS North Carolina and the one from the Raleigh fire station, had been present on campus at the same time — one in storage the other on the roof of Withers.

Although he said he knows now that there was no patriotic fervor on the part of the University, Robbins said he’s still unsure why the bell was tucked away under Riddick and never used to replace the steam whistle. He hasn’t been able to find any other accounts of that bell between the first Technician article and the bell’s subsequent entry into the museum’s collection more than 25 years later.

He points to one of the last lines of the Technician article, which says that in the event that the replacement of the whistle is impossible “because of possible damage to the bell through constant use, steps will be take in the future to purchase some bell for this purpose.”

“The only speculation I have is that they found the [USS North Carolina] bell unusable,” Robbins said. “They had to know the bell was a dud and got a new one.”

Gaps in the story of the Raleigh fire station bell, which now sits atop Withers Hall, are also mysterious. For one, there’s no indication of how the University acquired the bell from the city.

Although the city fire tower was demolished in 1938, there’s no clear reference to the bell until 1946, in a memo Robbins found that detailed the order for the bell’s installation apparatus, including materials from the “International Business Machine Company.” Aerial photos of the building showed that the bell’s enclosure was not present in 1946. But the bell’s cupola did show up in a photo from the 1948 Agromeck yearbook, meaning that it had been installed almost 10 years after the fire tower’s demolition.

“Odds are we’re never going to find that information,” Robbins said. “There very well could have never been a paper trail at all.”

‘Perfect timing’ On top of Withers Hall, the rain drops continued to drizzle down and steal what little warmth I had left. Robbins was still circling the bell with his camera phone, getting a few last images to add to his collection.

Then a sound broke the morning’s silence.

At 10 a.m., the electronic carillon system of the Bell Tower began to mark the time, its sound emanating from speakers placed in its belfry. Robbins looked out across the Court of North Carolina and grinned.

“Perfect timing,” he said.

A few minutes later, he reached into his bag and pulled out a hammer and a bright red foam finger from some past NCSU sporting event.

“This is the part you don’t tell anyone about,” Robbins said.

At the time of the 1938 article from The Raleigh Times, the bell had last been rung in 1930 to mark the death of veteran firefighter E.A. Lasater. “A sledge hammer, used to ring it at the Lasater death, broke out a small section,” the article read.

On top of Withers, the bell’s ring had been sporadic, with the last confirmed rings sounding during the building’s renovation in 2006, during operational tests, according to University Capital Project Manager Sammy Sams.

Robbins folded up the finger carefully on the bell, and using the hammer, rapped the bell through the foam. A rich, deep tone erupted loudly from the aged bronze, splitting the silence of the morning.

After more than 50 years, using the crudest of tools, Robbins released the bell from its silent incarceration.