GOULDSBORO – A small ship’s bell sits on the floor of the town vault, under shelves crammed with folders and municipal documents. Inconspicuous as it appears, it has been the center of an international controversy.

To Canadians, the bell is the historical equivalent of our Liberty Bell, and our northern neighbors would like to have it back.

No way, say the townspeople of Gouldsboro. It’s staying put, even if it’s just sitting under a copy of the town budget.

Ah, but in the spirit of international cooperation, a compromise is being worked out. The good people of Gouldsboro have come up with a plan to make a replica of the bell and then ship it north.

Now everyone can have their bell and ring it, too.

The bell once had a home on the Queen Victoria, a Canadian ship that was the site of a meeting that led to the formation of Canada. But the bell was given to Rufus Allen, a Gouldsboro ship’s captain who saved the lives of the Canadian crew when the Queen Victoria sank off the coast of North Carolina.

“It’s Gouldsboro’s bell,” Town Manager Bradford Vassey said this week. “It’s not our Liberty Bell, but, to this municipality, it’s important.”

Randy Boswell, a Canadian wire service journalist looking for a news story in recognition of July 1, Canada Day, reminded his compatriots this week of their missing bell. Had he not been told of Gouldsboro’s proposal, he admitted he might have helped perpetuate the controversy by advocating for the bell’s return to Canada.

“Maybe this is a reasonable kind of solution,” Boswell said Wednesday from his office in Ottawa.

According to Beatrice Buckley, president of the Gouldsboro Historical Society, the issue of whether Canada or Gouldsboro should keep the bell has been a contentious one for as long as she can remember.

“Every so many years, it comes to the forefront again,” Buckley said recently, sitting in her Pond Road home leafing through a notebook of articles about the bell she has compiled over the years.

The connection between the bell and the ship had been forgotten, but was re-discovered in the 1960s when a Gouldsboro man read a story about the Queen Victoria in a Canadian magazine, according to a newspaper clipping in Buckley’s files. The man did some research and determined Gouldsboro’s bell was indeed the same one that was on the historic ship.

Buckley said the bell is a prominent symbol of Gouldsboro’s seafaring and shipbuilding heritage. Not only was Capt. Allen a native son, but the brig Ponvert, Allen’s ship when he saved the crew of the sinking Canadian steamer, was made in Gouldsboro, she said.

“It’s a part of history,” Buckley said of the bell. “[It’s] priceless.”

The 16-inch-wide bell, estimated to weigh 100 pounds, used to be on the Queen Victoria, a 173-foot Canadian steamer that sank in 1866 about 100 miles off Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, according to historical records.

The ship was returning to Canada from Cuba with a cargo of cigars, tobacco and fruit when it was caught in a hurricane and started taking on water.

The Ponvert, a smaller American vessel captained by Allen, came across the foundering ship and took on its crew. The Canadians were so grateful for being rescued that they removed the bell from their doomed ship and gave it to Allen before the Queen Victoria sank beneath the waves.

In 1875, after keeping the bell for a few years in his sail loft, Allen donated the bell to his hometown. For more than 75 years, it was mounted at the schoolhouse in the Gouldsboro village of Prospect Harbor. The bell was taken down from a cupola on the school building in the 1950s and was kept and maintained for a while by the Prospect Harbor Women’s Club.

The bell now sits in the town vault in the Gouldsboro town office, the site of the old school which was demolished in the 1980s.

Before the bell came into Capt. Allen’s possession, it had acquired the luster of Canadian history on its original berth. In 1864, the founders of Canada sailed on the Queen Victoria to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where they attended a conference on how the colonies north of the United States could separate themselves from Great Britain and form an independent country.

“The key meeting took place on the ship,” Boswell said.

Members of the colonial governments met informally on the Queen Victoria moored in Charlottetown Harbor. Over drinks and cigars, they came to an accord on how they would form Canada.

“They basically agreed to create this country,” Boswell said.

Confederated Canada did not become an official entity until three years later, but the Charlottetown conference is considered the start of the process that led to Canada’s birth as a nation, hesaid.

Acknowledging the thorniness of the bell ownership issue, the journalist said, “I would say it’s a waste to have an historical artifact locked away.”

Gouldsboro Town Manager Bradford Vassey said the controversy over the bell is one reason the town decided not to keep it outside in the open anymore, but instead put it under lock and key in the town’s safe.

“Commercially, I’m sure it’s valuable,” Vassey said. “It’s worth a lot of money.”

Spurred by Boswell’s inquiry, the Gouldsboro selectmen informally have approved the plan to have a replica made, the town manager said. The effort is intended to help smooth over some of the feelings left from the old dispute.

“This [plan] is to put it to bed in a satisfactory manner for both parties,” Vassey said. “We won’t return the bell to them, but we’ll give them a darn good copy.”

Richard Fisher, who owns and runs the U.S. Bells foundry on West Bay Road in Gouldsboro, tentatively has agreed to make the replica, which would cost about $2,000 in materials and labor.

“I’m about 90 percent sure I can do it,” Fisher said recently.

Fisher said he would prefer not to have a prescribed deadline if he makes the bell, which is larger than the bells typically made at his foundry. The engraved detailing on the bell, the name “Queen Victoria” curves around the date 1856, the year the ship was built, will be difficult to re-create, he said.

“I don’t want to do it if I can’t do a good job,” he said.

George MacDonald, mayor of Charlottetown, said Wednesday he would be happy to have a replica of the bell to display in Founders’ Hall, a Charlottetown museum dedicated to Canada’s early history. He understands the significance the bell has to Gouldsboro and why the town does not want to part with it.

“We would do most anything” to help with the effort of making and transporting the replica to Canada, MacDonald said. “It will be an exchange of friendship between two countries, which we should be doing more of.”

One local businessman is helping to raise money to make the replica. Ben Walter, owner of Oceanside Meadows Inn in Gouldsboro, is selling copies of a recent photograph he took of the bell at the Prospect Harbor waterfront. Walter decided to get involved in making the replica a reality because of the bell’s historical significance.

“It could turn into a national thing because it’s very important,” Walter said.

Buckley said she has no problem with making a replica of the bell for the Canadians, as long as the town of Gouldsboro doesn’t have to foot the bill. “They just can’t have the bell,” she said. “No, sir. I wouldn’t give it up for anything.”