Ever since William Gorham Rice's book Carillon Music and Singing Towers of the Old World and the New was published in 1925, many have considered the instrument which was installed in 1922 in the Metropolitan Church, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to be North America's first carillon.[1] Rice does mention among others four other instruments, one each for Notre Dame, Indiana; Buffalo, New York; and two for Philadelphia, Pennsylania, which predate the Toronto carillon, but he describes these as „assemblages of bells“ „which do not entirely fulfill the definition of a modern attunded carillon“.[2] In spite of this, these four have been repeatedly referred to as North American carillons existing previous to 1922.[3] The oldest of these, a purely automatic instrument with twenty-three bells cast by the French founder Bollée and delivered in 1856 to the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, has been claimed to be North America’s first carillon.[4]  However, since the articles of incorporation of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America define a carillon as an instrument „played from a keyboard permitting control of expression through variation of touch“, and since the World Carillon Federation further specifies „a baton keyboard“, it cannot be stated that Notre Dame aquired a carillon until the bells were equipped with such a keyboard in the mid-1950s.[5] By then it was far from being the continent’s first. What then of the other three „assemblages of bells“?
    The first of these was a series of forty-three bells which Bollée delivered in 1870 to St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Buffalo, New York.[6] They were ordered by a Catholic bishop who had been suitably impressed by those of Notre Dame in 1866 and may have been originally intended for an exhibition in Paris, where they were displayed in 1867. Bollée, who must have considered the carillon keyboard an outdated and cumbersome hindrance to playing, had recently fitted his instruments in Châlons-sur-Marne[7] and Châtellerault, France, with new types of pneumatic and mechanical piano keyboards, and the Buffalo instrument was duly equipped with a pneumatic one. Since these consoles, however, did not permit any „control of expression through variation of touch“, the instrument in Buffalo does not fit the definition of a carillon. It was not a success. By 1913 the peculiar console had been removed, and twenty of the bells were attached to a clavier to form a diatonic chime from c3 to a5. In 1927 the bells were finally taken down and placed in the church crypt. A similiar kind of experimental instrument with twenty-six bells was installed by Paccard in St. Vincent´s Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1900. Instead of a carillon keyboard, it had a type of harmonium console with piano keys. By pumping the pedals, the carillonneur set a large cylinder in motion whose rotation drove the instrument’s action.[8] Again no variation of touch was possible, so this instrument also does not correspond to the definition of a carillon.
    Of the so-called four early American carillons, that only leaves the twenty-five bells cast by Severinus van Aerschodt of Louvain, Belgium, for the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, dedicated in 1883. Did these actually belong to a carillon? Although van Aerschodt was chiefly engaged in casting genuine carillons for cities in and outside of Belgium, he also delivered instruments in 1881 and 1883 equipped with a so-called smulders clavier, a type of piano keyboard named after its inventor, piano manufacturer Frederick Smulders of Maastrict, the Netherlands. This console would have been especially appropriate for installations in areas where the art of carillon playing was virtually unknown. However, a recent examination of the tower of the Church of the Holy Trinity has provided conclusive evidence that the instrument originally installed there was in actual fact a two-octave carillon: „On the level below the bells one finds the ruins of the clavier; three batons and one pedal“[9] Though at present in a state of total disrepair, the instrument in the Church of the Holy Trinity was thus the first carillon to be installed in the United States and on the North American continent according to today’s official definition. And it was played by a carillonneur, Charles W. H. Bancroft, who began playing about 1900 at the age of about fifteen and performed for forty-five years.[10] Percival Price, who has been named as North America’s first carillonneur, knew of Bancroft; yet the latter was never accorded the recognition due to him as a pioneer in his field. [11] how was this possible?
    One of the cardinal reasons is the evident confusion in the minds of carillonneurs and carillon scholars