Where's the bell?

St. Joseph's Catholic Historical Cemetery is home to a century and a half of Mid-Valley history. But the graveyard on the west side of Highway 70 at Marysville's northern tip also is a constant target for vandals and thieves — including the unknown ones who made off with a church bell earlier this month.

The cemetery's second reported break-in in three years deprived it of the iron bell that adorned the veterans' burial area, according to Merle Henry, a volunteer caretaker there. The incident follows the May 2006 smashing of headstones and markers, one of numerous unsolved attacks at a graveyard dating to Marysville's roots in the 1850s.

"Vandalism's been going on here a long, long time," Henry said Thursday while surveying the metal stirrups that had held the bell — his mood perhaps more philosophical after numerous acts of theft and headstone smashing at the site.

Attempts to contact Sgt. John Osbourn of the Marysville police were unsuccessful. Cemetery volunteers said Thursday they planned to file a theft report with the department.

Volunteers with the Knights of Columbus, which sponsors restoration efforts at St. Joseph's cemetery, said the bell apparently disappeared more than two weeks ago. Caretakers arriving to mow the lawns and tend to graves discovered the theft about a week later, the bell's metal mounts apparently battered with a hammer.

The thief may have cut through a chain-link fence to get at the artifact, according to Henry — a common problem at a site easily reached, and looted, both from Highway 70 and a trail-topped levee nearby.

Henry said the iron bell originally was cast in the late 19th century for a German Catholic congregation in Marysville. After the building was disassembled and rebuilt in Williams, St. Joseph's Catholic Church housed the bell for decades in its basement before Knights of Columbus volunteers moved it to the Catholic cemetery in 2002.

For now, caretakers hold out some hope the bell will turn up in one piece, though they have visited the Simpson Lane Flea Market in nearby Linda at least once in search of suspicious scrap iron. But they admitted even the recovery of the bell would not solve what seems an intractable problem.

"All these unattended places are easy targets; it's been going on 100 years," he said, passing by numerous markers broken and reassembled like vases. "You wonder why they do this. It's hard to understand people wanting to do that."