Henry McShane, from Dundalk to Baltimore.

McShane was founded in Baltimore by Henry McShane, who emigrated from Dundalk, in Ireland, in 1847, worked for the Baltimore brass founders Clampitt & Regester, and then, according to the reference site towerbells.org, “set up his own bell and brass foundry in 1856.” Sources differ on his year of birth, so we leave it out. The foundry later suffered a fire set by an employee; the company and towerbells.org give different years, 1948 and 1946.

The firm changed its name many times — McShane’s Bell Foundry, McShane & Bailey, Henry McShane & Co., Henry McShane Manufacturing Co. of Baltimore City, and from 1905 the McShane Bell Foundry Co. In 1942, after the death of Dennis C. McAleer, whose family had held it, it was sold to William R. Parker Sr., a tool-and-die maker, according to towerbells.org and the Verdin legacy site; Wikipedia gives 1935, but we use 1942. It passed to William Parker Jr. and William Parker III, and moved to Glen Burnie, Maryland, in 1979.

Its bells are scattered across America. towerbells.org says the 7,100-pound bell of Baltimore City Hall, cast in 1889, is “the largest McShane bell known to be still in service.” The company lists a thirteen-bell chime for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, a University of Virginia chapel bell of 1897 and a Liberty Bell replica cast in 1953, and the Pocahontas Bell of 1907; the 1953 replica’s casting, the company says, was attended by Maryland’s governor, Theodore McKeldin. The last of its historic chimes, sixteen bells, went to Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore in 1958.

Sold in parts in 2019.

The Parker family’s era, which had lasted for seventy-seven years, ended in 2019. towerbells.org describes it this way: “the last of the Parkers sold the company piecemeal; the molding cases & strickles and some other foundry equipment went to the Sunderlin bellfoundry, while the intellectual property rights and records were acquired by the owner of Americlock of Saint Louis; the two companies now share the same address.” The company’s own post of January 2020 says: “For centralizing of fabrication and shipping in the U.S., the team made the move from Baltimore, Maryland to St. Louis, MO.”

Today it trades as McShane Bell Company — a new name for a new chapter in a new state — at an address in Maryland Heights, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri. It still offers new cast bells and clocks, and says “Our bells are produced using time honored techniques and with state of the art foundry craftsmanship,” but it does not say where they are cast. We found no statement of an operating McShane foundry in Missouri, so we say only that the company does not state where its new bells are cast.

Its claims are large, and they rest almost entirely on the founding date. Its site calls it “America’s oldest church bell company since 1856,” and elsewhere “America’s Oldest Bell Foundry,” and says “Over 100,000 McShane church bells ring out”; Wikipedia gives a higher figure. We attribute both. Its homepage, when we checked in October 2026, still showed both a stale “164 + years” counter, and a Maryland telephone number.

Copper, tin and a wartime loss.

Bell metal is a bronze of roughly four parts copper to one of tin — “approximately 78% copper and 22% tin,” according to the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America. Tin is the costly part: the US Geological Survey says the average New York price of refined tin rose 13 per cent in 2025, to 1,600 cents a pound.

Bells have also been treated as raw metal in wartime. A 1947 photograph in Germany’s federal archives shows the “Glockenfriedhof” — bell cemetery — in Hamburg’s free port, captioned: “Diese Glocken wurden von den Nazis während des II. Weltkrieges beschlagnahmt um sie einzuschmelzen” — these bells were confiscated by the Nazis during the Second World War to be melted down. German sources estimate that about 45,000 bells were destroyed in Germany and some 35,000 more from occupied territories; the figures vary, so we attribute them. The same German sources say some 65,000 bells were melted down in the First World War, and that after 1945 more than 13,000 surviving bells were identified and returned from Hamburg.

Handbell ringing has its own institutions. The American Guild of English Handbell Ringers, which does business as Handbell Musicians of America, describes itself as “a non-profit organization established in 1954” to “promote the art of English Handbell Ringing”; its national mission today is “Advancing the musical art of handbell and handchime ringing.” McShane’s business is tower and church bells rather than handbells, but both trades depend on the same alloy.

Bells are recognised as culture too. In 2014 UNESCO selected Belgium’s programme for “Safeguarding the carillon culture” for its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices, and in 2022 it inscribed manual bell ringing in Spain — extended to Italy in 2024 — on its Representative List, calling it “a form of communication that is tied to the classification, acoustics and shapes of bells, bell towers and belfries.”

1856 on a company that moved.

McShane’s identity is a date and a superlative — “BELLS & CLOCKS SINCE 1856,” “America’s Oldest Bell Foundry” — attached to a name that now lives in a different state, under different owners, from the foundry that earned it.

For a design guide, McShane is the clearest example in this round of a name sold separately from its tools, and a reminder that “oldest” is a claim about a name as much as a place. The moulds went to one bell foundry; the name, the records and the website went to St Louis. Compare Meneely, whose name stopped with its foundries, and Whites of Appleton, which holds Whitechapel’s patterns.

The 2019 split also shows how a bell business is made of separable parts: moulding equipment, intellectual property, records, a website and a name. McShane’s parts went in different directions, and the name went with the records to Missouri.

For this guide we use a green and a sage with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No bell or mark is reproduced.

Keep McShane Bell’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.