N.J.’s Liberty Bell — yes, we have our own — is better than Philly’s. Here’s why.
Perth Amboy City Hall in New Jersey.
There’s something to celebrate on the 4th of July in each of New Jersey’s 564 municipalities, but only one has its very own Liberty Bell to let freedom ring.
As they do every year, Perth Amboy residents gather in Market Square opposite historic City Hall to ring the replica Liberty Bell 13 times – one toll for each of 13 original colonies.
“It’s an exact replica – except ours doesn’t have a crack,” said John Kerry Dyke, Perth Amboy’s city historian.
The bell was a gift from the U.S. Department of the Treasury under President Harry S. Truman. It was one of 53 replicas cast in France as part of the Truman Administration’s campaign to encourage Americans to buy U.S. Savings Bonds.
Each of the 48 states and five U.S. territories (Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Washington D.C. and U.S. Virgin Islands) got its own Liberty Bell. Most states mounted their Liberty Bell in their respective capitals, but New Jersey’s bell was sent to Perth Amboy, for reasons that remain unclear.
A grave marker at St. Peters Episcopal Church that had its the top blown off by a cannonball during the summer of 1776 as a British warship fired on Perth Amboy.
Dyke said it’s a bit of a mystery, but before New Jersey had Trenton as the state capital, Perth Amboy at the time of the American Revolution was the seat of royal government in colonial New Jersey. And its royal governor was William Franklin, who was loyal to the crown despite the rabble-rousing of his father, Benjamin Franklin.
Proprietary House in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, is the only governor's mansion of the original thirteen colonies still standing. Architect and builder John Edward Pryor began construction began in 1762 and it was completed in 1764.
And in a dramatic prelude of what was to come, William Franklin was arrested at his governor’s residence in Perth Amboy on June 19, 1776 – just two weeks before his father signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.
“Here in old Perth Amboy, we celebrate Independence Day in a tradition that goes back to 1776,” Dyke said. “As was done by colonial troops 249 years ago, we fire cannons, shoot muskets, play fife and drums, and read the Declaration of Independence in our historic City Hall Circle. It is a grand ceremony.”
The ceremony begins at noon, and climaxes with the ringing of the Liberty Bell at 2 p.m. The tolling of the bell is done in accordance with a 1963 congressional resolution, that orders each state to ring its Liberty Bell on July 4th.
Most historians agree that the real Liberty Bell – the one with the crack encased in plexiglass outside Constitution Hall in Philadelphia – didn’t ring on the 4th of July 1776. It rang four days later, during the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Dyke, a lifelong Amboy resident (locals drop the ‘Perth’ part) who lives in a house built in 1760, said there’s still a lot to see of the American Revolutionary past. The journey starts with city hall, which dates to 1714, and is the oldest municipal building in continuous operation in the United States.
Perth Amboy historian John Kerry Dyke in front of the replica Liberty Bell, which will be rung 13 times to celebrate Independence Day.
It was in the meeting hall on the second floor – currently the Perth Amboy City Council chambers – where the state Assembly ratified the Bill of Rights on November 20, 1789, making New Jersey the first state to do so.
And it was at Perth Amboy City Hall in 1870 that Thomas Mundy Peterson became the first African American to vote following adoption of the 15th Amendment.
A plaque on the wall tells the story of Mundy’s vote in a local Perth Amboy charter election on March 31, 1870, an historic moment the N.J. Legislature recognized 128 years later with a resolution designating March 31 as Thomas Mundy Peterson Day.
“A lot of important things happened in that building,” Dyke said.
Under British rule, colonial New Jersey in the 1600s was split into two provinces, East and West.
Perth Amboy, a natural port that was a quick canoe ride across the Arthur Kill to Staten Island, was the center of East Jersey. Burlington, a village along the Delaware River that was close to Philadelphia, was the center of West Jersey.
In an effort to unify the provinces, Queen Ann in 1702 appointed the first royal governor to keep the New Jersey colony in line. The first royal governor, Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury didn’t last long; colonists accused him of corruption and cross-dressing to look like the queen, and he was recalled in 1708.
Things were worse for New Jersey’s last royal governor, William Franklin, who was appointed in 1763 and was the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. Father and son enjoyed a close relationship when they lived in London from 1757 to 1763 but split after William was appointed royal governor and Ben became a rabble-rouser.
The father-son drama is told in “The Loyal Son,” a biography of William Franklin written by Daniel Mark Epstein and published by Random House in 2017.
According to Epstein, to curry favor with the new royal governor, the wealthy proprietors of East Jersey built William Franklin a mansion in Perth Amboy.
Franklin took up residence in Perth Amboy, just a cannonball shot from British-occupied Staten Island, and tried to keep the colony together. Meanwhile, his father, in nearby Philadelphia, fomented rebellion.
William Franklin’s reign as governor officially ended on June 19, 1776, when Continental Army troops led by Nathaniel Heard of Woodbridge surrounded the Proprietary House on Kearny Avenue, and carted him off to Burlington, where he would stand trial for siding with the crown.
“So at last it had come to this,” Epstein writes of that dramatic moment. “On a late afternoon in June near the solstice, when the farmers work late in the fields, Governor Franklin, surrounded by armed men on horseback, was led like a bear along the High Road through Middlesex County for all the world to see.” They marched through New Brunswick, Princeton, Trenton, and all the way to Burlington, where Franklin was put on trial and then sent to Connecticut and placed under house arrest.
Paroled in 1779 as part of a prisoner swap, Franklin moved to New York City. He organized Loyalist guerillas to fight the patriots, but fled to England when the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781.
New Jersey's replica Liberty Bell is located in Perth Amboy.
“You could say that the Proprietary House was the last seat of British government in the colonies,” said Mary Ellen Pavlovsky, a trustee of the Proprietary House Association.
Abandoned as the governor’s mansion, Pavlovsky said the Proprietary House served many functions in the 249 years after the revolution, as a hotel, a retirement home for Presbyterian ministers, and, by the mid-20th Century, as a boarding house.
Pavlovsky, like Dyke a lifelong Perth Amboy resident, said it wasn’t until 1967 that the State of New Jersey took possession of the original governor’s mansion, and began what she described as a “long and slow” restoration effort.
Now a museum, the Proprietary House is currently closed as the state installs a sprinkler system in anticipation of the semiquincentennial in 2026. Independence Day 2025 begins the one-year countdown to the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026.
Pavlovsky remembers watching a reenactment of William Franklin’s arrest at the Proprietary House during the bicentennial on July 4, 1976, and hopes to see another one.
“I remember it well,” she said.
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