Bears.
New Bern’s full of them. They’re all over the place. Sticking out of buildings. Standing on corners. Decorating flags. Even the high school football team is named after them. So what’s that all about?
Well, it easy to say, “New Bern is named for Berne, Switzerland, and Berne means bear in Switzerland-ese.” But that’s just scratching the surface of the story.
To get the crux of it, you gotta go deep. Have you heard the one about the Swiss bear gathering firewood for a monk? Didn’t think so.
According to the New Bern Sun of April 6, 1914, City Attorney Romulus A. Nunn had held forth recently with a tale about St. Gall. The Irish Catholic monk settled in Switzerland in the year 614 looking for converts. He established a monastery of the Benedictine order which would eventually become an abbey. The resulting town and abbey hold the bear in high esteem and have it on their coat of arms because they say a bear was the first convert the saint made in Switzerland.
The story goes, “St. Gall, it seems, whom they call the great apostle of Germany, found all this country little better than a desert. As he was walking in it on a very cold day, he chanced to meet a bear in his way. The saint, instead of being startled in the encounter, ordered the bear to bring him a bundle of wood, and make him a fire. The bear served him to the best of his ability, and, at his departure, was commanded by the saint to retire into the very depth of the woods and to pass the rest of his life without ever hurting man or beast.”
The bear, we are told, lived irreproachably to his dying day. The “gentlemanly conduct and brotherly bearing” of the bear won the hearts of the people of that section and, when it came time to name the town – they named it Berne. They adopted St. Gall’s first acolyte as their symbol and, for the next 1,400 years, splashed it all over town.
New Bern, taking its cues from the namesake city, has done the same. The 1914 newspaper story ends by saying “the symbol [of the bear] reminds us of the lasting influence of generous hospitality.”
by Edward Ellis, Special Correspondent
Eddie Ellis is the author of New Bern History 101 and other works about Craven County’s rich heritage. He can be reached at flexspace2@aol.com.