The company in East Hampton was established in 1832 and now produces more than 200 kinds of bells. ”Some are decorative, some are functional, and some just are,” said Stanley R. Bevin, president of the company.

Mr. Bevin is the fifth generation of his family to oversee Bells by Bevin, as the products are known. ”We’re the oldest family-run business in Connecticut,” he said. ”We were an early part of the Industrial Revolution.” He noted that at first Bevin products included coffee mills and waffle irons. ”But, from 1890 on, we basically made nothing but bells.”

The Bell Town

In the 19th century several bell companies flourished in East Hampton. ”They employed most of the people,” said William Devine, chairman of the East Hampton Town Council, ”and they controlled most of the politics. That’s what I hear.”

Today, East Hampton is still nicknamed the Bell Town, and the local McDonald’s displays hundreds of bells in two large display cases. But Bevin Brothers is the only firm that keeps up the tradition of making bells.

The company operates in a rambling two-story building that looks much as it did in turn-of-the-century photographs. It is on Bevin Boulevard, a dead-end street behind the local school. The entry is filled with display cases of bells; straps of sleigh bells and portraits of Bevins hang on the walls. Just off the entry is a small office, where boxes of bells cover the floor, the walls hold more portraits of Bevins and photographs of bell making, and Stanley Bevin works at a desk that is nearly covered with bells.

”I just have a collage here,” said Mr. Bevin. He pointed to one model about to be produced with a different kind of handle. ”And here’s a picture bell; this in particular is a cardinal bell,” he said, picking up a small white bell with a bright red cardinal painted on it. Mr. Bevin noted that the original drawing for the cardinal was made by his son, Christopher – then age 9 and now a sophomore in college.

The Uses of Bells

”There are multitudinous uses for bells,” said Mr. Bevin. The company’s catalogues – printed since 1858 – now show barbecue bells, call bells, tea bells, a speaker’s bell, Swiss and Kentucky cow bells, sheep bells, turkey bells, yacht bells, door bells, ice cream bells, Arctic sleigh bells, replicas of the Liberty Bell and more. The bells are made mainly of aluminum, brass or steel, and range is size from 12-inch diameter gongs down to 3/8-inch diameter sleigh bells. ”Those little guys,” Mr. Bevin said, ”sometimes I put them in my pocket and they get washed.”

Bells by Bevin are sold widely. Mr. Bevin cited sales around the country and to many foreign countries, to ”corner mom-and-pop stores and to major chains.” One enthusiastic customer of the firm is Nikki O’Neill, wife of Gov. William A. O’Neill. ”We have used many forms of Bevin bells,” said Mrs. O’Neill. ”Many, many times I’ve given their patio bell as a gift, and we have one on our patio.” She said she also gave the Bevins’ sleigh bells as gifts, had Bevin bells on the doorknobs of her home, and had an old communion bell made decades ago by the firm in the Governor’s hometown.

Earlier a Foundry

In earlier times, Bevin Brothers operated a foundry. But, said Mr. Bevin, ”We no longer cast here; today we fabricate and stamp.” The firm has its own tool and die departments as well as equipment for buffing, painting and plating. On a tour of the plant, Mr. Bevin pointed out huge metal presses and polishing machines and a room devoted to spray painting. He smiled at a worker carrying a bucket of door bells and stopped to talk with Ellen Smollack, who bent over a machine making loops to hold bell clappers.

Some 45 people work at Bevin Brothers; most are from East Hampton, and many have been with the company for years. ”I’ve worked with four generations of Bevins,” said Irving Anderson, the plant foreman. Mr. Bevin said that Bevins had long cared about their employees and their families. ”The human side of business has been going on here for almost 160 years,” he said. But he also noted that he works steadily to automate the plant and reduce the number of employees.

Mr. Bevin said that he is now the only member of his family actively engaged in running the venerable family enterprise. He runs it on his own terms, and does not disclose its profits or losses. ”This is my fiefdom,” he said. ”I’m master of the manor.”

A Family Business

But what he does discuss are his concerns about running a family business in an age of conglomerates and high taxes. ”The harder you work and the more you do,” he said, ”the greater your chances of ending up not owning your own business.” In his view, Federal policies are detrimental to small businesses, his and others, and he is bitter. ”We make enough to keep the doors open,” he said, but he noted that in the past year, three of his suppliers have gone out of business. He said he has considered moving his business out of the country.

Despite his concerns, he has hope for the future of Bevin Brothers. ”Who knows?” he said. ”We’ve been here for 158 years. Probably we can manage to outlast the United States Government.”

Cowbells, to be exact. The kind you hear spectators clanging as the racers pass by in the Tour de France.

The Amgen tour, which takes off Feb. 15 from downtown Davis, is California’s answer to the French bike-racing extravaganza. And, if it can have cowbells, then so can the Amgen, courtesy of Hess and the California Bicycle Museum.

“Bells are a bike-racing tradition,” Hess said. “They’re great noisemakers, a great way to cheer on the racers.”

Come Amgen tour day in Davis, the museum will be selling the bells, emblazoned with the city of Davis logo on one side and the California Bicycle Museum insignia on the other.

UC Davis and the city of Davis are partners in the museum, and Hess is a member of the board of directors, which is working to establish a permanent home for the museum as a showcase for the university’s extensive bicycle collection. Part of it is on display through Amgen weekend in the basement of the city’s Third and B Street Building.

By day, Hess is a professional researcher in the Department of Cell Biology and Human Anatomy in the School of Medicine. Outside of work, he is a cycling enthusiast. This year, for example, as a member of the Davis Bike Club, he will coordinate Foxy’s Fall Century for the fourth year in a row.

And, on recent Saturdays, he has been volunteering as a docent at the bicycle museum’s Third and B Street exhibition.

“Our goals,” he said, referring to the museum’s board of directors, “are to find a home for the museum, and to convince the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame to move to Davis.”

Now, with the special bells, everyone else can show their support for the museum — and Amgen, too.

The bells — with UC Davis lanyards provided by the university’s Office of Government and Community Relations — will be sold for $10 each. Look for them at the bicycle museum tent near the Amgen starting line on C Street adjacent to Central Park, and at the bicycle museum’s exhibition in the basement of the Third and B Street Building.

And, while there, look for the 1916 Pierce-Arrow bicycle and pay particular attention to its bell: It was made by Bevin bells of Connecticut, the same company that, nearly 100 years later, made the cowbells that the bicycle museum will be selling during the Amgen Tour of California.

The California Bicycle Museum exhibition in the Third and B Street Building will be open only four more days: 9 a.m. to noon Feb. 7 and 14, 4 to 7 p.m. Feb. 11 and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Feb. 15. Admission is free, with donations accepted.

You hear the sounds of bells a lot this time of year. For many people it signals the arrival of the holiday season. However, it means much more to one small Connecticut town. East Hampton was built on bells.

“East Hampton is known as Bell Town USA. In the 1800′s, it was often referred to as jingle town as well because so many bells have been made here,” said Matt Bevin, who runs his family’s bell business.

Throughout the decades thirty different bell companies have called East Hampton home. In time though, the bells went silent at every company but one.

“This is my grandfather, this is my great-grandfather, this is my great-great grandfather my great-great-great grandfather,” Matt Bevin says pointing to pictures hanging in the entrance of Bevin Brothers Manufacturing Company.

Bevin is the sixth generation to run the company his great-great-great grandfather and his three brothers started nearly two hundred years ago. “For better or worse, we’re the only company in the U.S. left that makes just bells,” said Bevin.

It’s a fact now lost on many of the town’s residents. “Now that we’ve become a bedroom town a lot of people don’t even know we’re back here,” said 30-year Bevin employee, Doug Dilla.

The company is in its 178th year in business. “There is a lot of pride in it and we have twenty-one employees. In this environment, in this day and age a lot of these folks would be hard pressed to find a job right now,” said Bevin.

There’s not a lot of work like this left either. Most of the manufacturing of a bell is still done by hand. “I think it’s remarkable we’re still here. We have a niche,” said Dilla. “We’re all ding-a-lings,” he says, laughing.

Some might say that’s so. Bell making isn’t exactly a cash cow business. But it’s in Matt Bevin’s blood. “We can’t compete with China and India on price. We have to compete on quality, we have to compete on customization, we have to compete on service,” he said.

That’s exactly what they do at Bevin brothers. The company still makes more than 200 varieties of bells, including all bells for the Salvation Army. “There’s just something magical about it and I just love the sound of bells. I really do,” said Bevin.

As do many others, especially this time of year.

“It’s called a tongue and makes the jingle sound,” says Yeaton, who has assembled bells for 20 years at Bevin Brothers Manufacturing Co. in East Hampton, Conn.

Since the company was founded in 1832, Bevin Brothers has manufactured more than 750 million bells, from bicycle and church bells to the hand bells jingled by thousands of Salvation Army bell ringers each Christmas season.

“We’ve been making bells before electricity, trains or bicycles were invented,” says Matt Bevin, 43, the sixth generation of the Bevin family to own the company.

As Bevin strides across the factory’s weathered floorboards, he literally walks in his ancestors’ footsteps. Bevin’s great-great-great grandfather Abner Bevin established the company in East Hampton with his brothers William, Chauncey and Philo.

Abner and William learned the bell-making trade as indentured servants from William Barton, the first bell maker in East Hampton, known since as Bell Town because it once was home to 30 bell manufacturers. In the 1820s, when the brothers’ contracted work terms expired, they set up small foundries in their backyards to cast bells by pouring molten metal into molds. In 1832, they joined forces and formed Bevin Brothers.

Today, Bevin Brothers is the last bell manufacturer in East Hampton (pop. 13,352). The company’s 19 employees produce, market and sell 1.2 million bells annually in 200 varieties, including call bells, door bells, dinner bells, ice cream bells, commemorative wedding and anniversary bells, and trip gongs that are used in prize fights and the mining industries. The bells are sold to retail stores and sports teams, and to businesses and charitable organizations that use them for advertising and fundraising campaigns.

“There is something universally appealing about a bell—the sound, the novelty of it, the nostalgia associated with jingle bells and wedding bells,” Bevin says. “For that reason, they endure globally.”

While Bevin Brothers stopped casting bells in 1979, the company continues to stamp them from rolls of sheet metal. “We buy sheets of brass, copper and steel that run through a machine that does the cutting and forming,” says Doug Dilla, 54, the company’s operations manager. After the bells are stamped, they are cleaned to remove oil residue, dried in corncob dust and dropped into a hopper to separate the bells from the dust. The bells’ sharp edges are filed off, the tongues are inserted, and straps or handles are added. Bells are polished, powder-coated or metal-plated, and custom orders are imprinted with artwork, logos, names and dates.

“They have a beautiful tone,” says Bob Bell, 70, president of the Essex Steam Train & Riverboat in Essex, Conn. (pop. 6,505), who buys 15,000 miniature ornamental bells from Bevin each year to give as Christmastime keepsakes to children who ride the North Pole Express Train.

During its 178-year history, Bevin Brothers produced the first bicycle bells; created souvenir bells for the presidential campaigns of Calvin Coolidge and Thomas Dewey, and commemorative bells for President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration; and manufactured more than 1 million bells for the Salvation Army.

“They’re sturdy and create a sound that is inviting,” says Maj. Steve Morris, 45, a Salvation Army commander in Washington, D.C., who buys 300 Bevin Brothers hand bells each year.

Against all odds, Bevin Brothers has endured for nearly two centuries, producing a product that has resonated through six generations. “We have Yankee ingenuity going for us and a family that, from one generation to the next, has had someone willing to keep things running,” Bevin says. “My job is to get us to 200 years. That has a nice ring to it.”

In East Hampton, Connecticut, one factory refuses to die. The old mill building stands dark and brooding. Its floorboards creak underfoot, and its red-brick walls have dulled with age. The old millstream flows quietly under the factory, while the flywheels it once powered hang still from the rafters. On a foggy morning, you’d swear the place was abandoned, but then someone flips on the lights and powers up the presses. The building breathes. As people get to work, it grows unnervingly loud in some places, unbearably hot in others. It is, quite simply, not pretty. But work rarely is.

The fate of Bevin Bros. came down to a single decision in 2008. The company had reached its 176th anniversary, but domestic taxes and cheap foreign labor were pushing it to the brink. Stanley R. Bevin, the fifth generation of Bevins to run the company in an unbroken line dating back to its founding, had had enough. He asked his nephew Matt whether he wanted to have a go at being the sixth.

“I don’t know why I took this on,” Matt says jokingly. The factory is just one more responsibility on his already-full plate. Only 43 years old, Matt is the president, chief investor, or a board member of 10 companies scattered around the country. If you ask him to name them all, he has to stop and think about it. His primary business is an investment-management firm in Kentucky that handles $2.7 billion of other people’s money. So, yes, Matt understands exactly how bad an investment a bell company is.

In the 19th century, if you were to come across a manufactured bell anywhere in the world, there was a good chance that it came from East Hampton (then called Chatham). For more than 100 years, bells sustained this city, home to 30 different manufacturers at one time or another. Founded in 1832, Bevin was one of the earliest and most successful.

But as the 20th century progressed, the bell industry succumbed to the same reality that’s been the scourge of other American manufacturers: It’s just plain cheaper to make simple products elsewhere. The other bell factories in town folded, one by one, until by the 1970s only Bevin Bros. remained.

Today, the factory employs just 20 people, and East Hampton has long since made the transition to post-industrial “bedroom community.” If Bevin Bros. were to go under, the town wouldn’t change much. Still, it’s important to Matt that the story here doesn’t play out the same way it has everywhere else. He didn’t come to East Hampton just to make bells; he came to make a statement.

“To me, this is a testament to perseverance,” he says. “This is a testament to proving that you can still manufacture and exist in America.”

Matt Bevin grew up to the sound of bells; he spent childhood vacations visiting his grandmother in East Hampton. Her parlor was like a showroom: Sleigh bells hung from the walls on worn leather straps, and handbells of all kinds were neatly arranged on shelves and tables. From his grandmother’s home, Matt would make the short trip down the hill to the factory, and, when he wasn’t busy sliding down the delivery chute, he’d help install tongues in the bells. The passion stuck with him, and he’s become a collector and connoisseur in his own right. He even claims to be able to spot a Chinese-made call bell from 10 paces: “It’s never quite straight.”

Bevin Brothers, one of the oldest continuously operated factories in Connecticut, is the last remnant of a once-thriving industry that earned East Hampton the nickname “Bell Town, USA,” an improbable holdout in a business that has moved to the low-wage producers of Asia.

But the sixth-generation operator of a family business that dates back to 1832 believes sleigh bells — and the iconic appeal they evoke at Christmas — can save the enterprise well into the 21st century.

“We are the last manufacturer of bells left in North America, all that remains of an industry in East Hampton that once produced 90 percent of the world’s sleigh bells,” says Matt Bevin, who took over Bevin Brothers in 2008 and has since struggled to revive the moribund family firm. “In an electronic age when much of the sound of bells can be replicated on your iPhone, how do you capitalize on the real thing? That’s the challenge we’re testing here now.”

It turns out there is more life left in the simple brass or steel bell than most people would think. One of Bevin’s largest customers is Poochie Pets, a Simsbury company that attaches Bevin sleigh bells to a nylon strap that can be hung on door handles, so dogs can ring them when they need to be let out. Other companies attach the sleigh bells to traditional leather straps for decorative door hangings at Christmas.

All told, the company markets more than 700,000 sleigh bells a year, in addition to cow bells sold for spectators at football games and ski races, teacher’s bells, tea bells and patio and yacht bells.

Cheryl Pedersen, who started Poochie Pets in 2005, originally imported all of her bells from China to take advantage of their low cost. But after sales at her company took off two years ago, Bevin approached her about supplying bells from Connecticut, and she was impressed by the company’s pricing and quality. She now orders about 500,000 Bevin sleigh bells a year.

“Bevin is now stamping our dog-paw logo on the bells, and reinforces them so that they don’t get squished when they are caught in the door,” Pedersen says. “You wouldn’t get that kind of service from a supplier in China, and we like the fact that it’s all made right here in Connecticut. Matt is a role model for a lot of small companies like us because we’re all trying to show that this kind of thing can still survive in America and be innovative, and that’s what he’s doing.”

Bevin Brothers is also the sole supplier for another Christmastime staple — the hand bells that Salvation Army workers ring outside retail stores. The company recently supplied new bells for Macy’s, when the department store chain was refurbishing the red suits for all its Santas.

Bevin, 43, an entrepreneur who also operates a large asset management firm and other companies in Kentucky, remembers running down the factory floors as a boy. He took over the bell company after other family members concluded he was the only member of his generation with both the business know-how and capital to save the firm, and he has spent the past two years reorganizing the shop floor, rebuilding sales relationships with customers and creating strategies for winning back business that the company has lost to China and other Asian manufacturers over the past 20 years.

Shortly after he took over, Bevin called all of his employees together and told them, “We make a product that people really don’t need any more but still seem to want. How can we take advantage of that and grow in smart ways?”

Smart growth includes such concepts as pooch bells or line alerts for ice fisherman, but Bevin suspects that reviving the company will have more to do with the embedded appeal that bells have.

“It’s nostalgia,” Bevin says. “Bells make attractive sounds that bring back so many important moments in a life — weddings, the dinner bell, Christmas. They conjure up images that were important in people’s lives.”

That nostalgia runs deep in the New England experience, even if few people recall exactly how sleigh bells came to symbolize winter and the Christmas season. In the 19th century, when roads were narrow and curved, sleigh runners gliding over the snow were almost completely silent. Harness bells were introduced to warn pedestrians and others on the road about the approach of another sleigh, and were considered so important that many states passed laws requiring their use.