Veazy & White Bell foundry

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Hiram Veazey was born on November 11, 1816 in East Hampton, CT. He was born the youngest child of five to Mr. and Mrs. Eleazer & Elizabeth Veazey who were from Chatham, CT. Starting as a young boy Hiram worked on his family’s farm when he was not attending school. After he finished school, at about the age of 19, he started working in the local foundry of Goff & Abell where he got his first experience at foundry work. J.N. Goff & Amiel Abell were one of the early bell foundries in East Hampton making mostly small bells and sleigh bells. He spent about two years working in that foundry learning much, not only about foundry work in general, but also about the process of making bells. At about the age of 21 he moved to New Jersey and worked in an iron foundry, acquiring even more knowledge about foundry work. He only spent about two years at this foundry as well and then in 1839 he relocated back to East Hampton and partnered with his brother Warren Veazey and started a small bell foundry. This partnership only lasts a few years because in 1842 Hiram left this business and purchased the very first foundry he ever worked in, the foundry of Goff & Abell, which he obviously knew very well. This foundry at that time was called The East Hampton Bell Company. The deal that he made with J.N Goff and Amiel Abell was that he would buy the foundry outright, but the water rights they owned on the river, he would lease from them for a period of ten years. It wasn’t long before he brought in a partner, Mr. Charles A. Buell to help him run the foundry. 

Buell and Veazey were partners for about ten years after which in 1859, Buell left the company and Hiram Veazey brought in another partner, Mr. Alfred B. White. It was at this time that the foundry name would be changed to Veazey & White. 

Before he went into business with Hiram Veazey, he formed a partnership with John Watraus Barton when the two of them purchased the patent from John’s brother Jason Barton for a call bell. White brought with him the knowledge of casting larger bells from previous professional experience. This set the foundry apart from all the other foundries in town as now, they were the only ones that were casting real church bells. There is some evidence that White may have learned how to cast large bells from working in the Holbrook Bell Foundry in East Medway.  

This partnership was very successful and allowed the foundry to expand. The core business was small bells, mostly sleigh bells and souvenir bells, but they also were very successful in manufacturing a door bell system which they patented. In fact, in 1869 Hiram Veazey was awarded a patent for a round ridge style bell that had a cylindrical pillar about 3/16” tall at its base. The pillar was designed to hold the bell off the leather strap so that it could vibrate longer and louder. It was also at this time that they expanded the foundry to be capable of casting large bells, which would be the only large scale bell foundry to ever be in East Hampton. 

There are a number of incredibly unique design elements on many of the large bells that were cast by Veazey & White at their East Hampton Bell Foundry. The shape of their bells is the first feature that really jumps out at you. The bells are very tall with an extremely long waist. The flare of the lip only starts about 2/3 of the way down from the top making it seem very tall and thin. The casting itself was pleasantly nice. The bell we had in our plant had about 16 bead lines on it and they were very nice, even and straight. The inscription on the bell that we had in the shop is raised but fairly untraditional as the foundry name, city & state and the year the bell was cast was located on the waist of the bell as opposed to the shoulder of the bell. 

The most unique design element on these bells is the ingenious design of the yoke and how it is fitted to the bell. Most anyone that is interested in large bells has heard of the rotary yoke and how early American bell founders believed that turning the bell regularly in the yoke was of utmost importance, to keep the bell from cracking. Each foundry had come up with their own versions of the “patented rotary yoke” system that made their yokes better than their competitors. Each foundry designed the simplest system that they could to make it easy for a person to go into the bell tower and in the span of just a few minutes, with only a wrench, the bell could be spun inside the yoke, so that the clapper would have new metal to hit. The idea was that if the clapper hit the same spot on the bell year after year, decade after decade, the bell would eventually break. Veazey & White obviously had this same belief, except what they did is design this mechanical system that would allow the bell to turn independent of the yoke automatically, every time the bell swung. The most striking feature on this mechanical system was a huge iron gear that was fitted between the top of the bronze bell and the bottom on the iron yoke. The system is described in the History of Middlesex County as “the bells were mounted with a patented contrivance, being a self-acting, rotating, automatic apparatus by which the clapper or tongue did not strike twice in the same place, thus obviating the liability to fracture”.

There were actually four different elements of this design that worked together to accomplish the feat of turning the bell automatically.