CARILLON TOWER

Nancy Brown Peace

Carillon Tower

Program: Commemorative Monument

Designed: Clarence E. Day (1939)

The Carillon Tower is one of Belle Isle’s many commemorative built moments with this one highlighting a local journalist and writer Anne Louis Brown. She was a prolific columnist writing on womens issues in the early

Style: Neo-Gothic

Accessibility: Closed to Public

Managed: Local Volunteers

The Tolling of the Bells

The tower was designed by Clarence E. Day, brother-in-law of James E. Scripps, the Detroit News publisher. The builder was Harlow A. Amsbary. The tower boasts a fully automatic bell music system inside a Neogothic tower and moat system. In 1970, the tower bells were stolen and the stained glass at the top broken. Soon after that the local wildlife destroyed many of the interior mechanisms that helped the bells chime.

Today, the carillon still chimes, but Detroit has been unable to amass the funds to fix the tower. The plant life is overgrown and its moat is filled with trash and algae. The new Oudolf Garden was recently finished in front of it solely through the help of passionate local volunteers who enlisted famous landscape architect Piet Oudolf to design a perennial (and didactic) garden in front of the tower.