Andrew Meneely began in 1826; his sons split.

The Meneely name belongs to a bell foundry that no longer exists — two of them, in fact. Andrew Meneely (1802–1851) set up a foundry in 1826 in Gibbonsville, later West Troy and now Watervliet, on the Hudson River in New York, according to Wikipedia and the local Hudson-Mohawk Industrial Gateway; one specialist history dates the start to around 1830, after he bought the shop of his teacher, Julius Hanks. We use 1826, the date most sources give.

The firm passed through his family under a string of names: Andrew Meneely & Son in 1849; Andrew Meneely’s Sons after his death in 1851; E.A. & G.R. Meneely in 1863; and Meneely & Company from 1874, according to the specialist site carillonhistory.us.

Then the family split. In June 1870 Andrew’s youngest son, Clinton H. Meneely, started a rival foundry across the river in Troy with George H. Kimberly — Meneely & Kimberly, later the Clinton H. Meneely Bell Company and then the Meneely Bell Company. An 1875 court case found that “each firm was entitled to use the name Meneely,” and the Watervliet Historical Society says: “Hard feelings between the two firms lasted for over fifty years.”

The Centennial Bell — and a closure.

The Troy firm cast the most famous Meneely bell. According to the US National Park Service, the Centennial Bell for Independence Hall in Philadelphia was cast in 1876 at the Meneely-Kimberly foundry in Troy. “It weighs 13,000 pounds to represent each of the original thirteen states,” the Park Service says, and contains metal from four cannons — two from Saratoga and two from Gettysburg. Its first sound was judged poor; it went back to Troy to be recast, and “By the end of 1876 workmen placed the recast Centennial Bell in the steeple of Independence Hall where it has been chiming the hours ever since.” It is not the Liberty Bell, which hangs nearby.

The West Troy firm had its own firsts. carillonhistory.us credits it with the first American-made carillon, for St James Episcopal Church in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1928, and with pioneering a form of two-point tuning around 1900. The Troy firm made one carillon, for the Deeds Carillon in Dayton, Ohio, in 1941. Between them, the two firms cast about 65,000 bells, according to Wikipedia and the Watervliet Historical Society.

Both closed within a year of each other. Sources differ on the details: Wikipedia says both closed in 1952; carillonhistory.us says West Troy closed in 1951 and Troy in 1952, under metal restrictions during the Korean War; the Watervliet Historical Society cites “Foreign competition…cast iron bells and unavailability of metals due to World War II.” We say they closed in 1951–52, amid metal shortages. The West Troy foundry site, on Broadway in Watervliet, is “no longer there,” the society says.

Wartime metal and a bell’s long life.

The name lives on in three places. The bells still ring. The firms’ bell ledgers are held by the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway in Troy, and financial records by the Gateway and the New York State Library. And a living maker cites it: Verdin says its bronze bells are “based on the profile of the famous Meneely of West Troy bell.” That is a design reference, not an ownership link.

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.

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 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.”

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.” Meneely’s foundries cast tower and church bells, not handbells, but American bell culture runs through both.

One surname cast on two rivals’ bells.

A Meneely brand was, in practice, the name cast into the bell itself, with the town — West Troy or Troy — telling a knowledgeable buyer which firm made it. The Gateway quotes old catalogue language for the firm’s hardware, describing its “conical rotary yoke” as “the most desirable and perfect rotary yoke in the world,” a fair sample of nineteenth-century trade confidence.

For a design guide, Meneely is an unusual lesson: a family name that two competing companies were legally entitled to use at once, for more than seventy years. Buyers had to learn to read the town as well as the surname, and the two firms spent half a century competing for the same churches. Under our rule for defunct businesses we say it plainly: both Meneely foundries closed in 1951–52, and no company makes Meneely bells today. Compare McShane, a Baltimore bell name of 1856 that left Maryland for Missouri in 2019.

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

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