The Verdin Company

The UNI campus community takes great pride in the Campanile. But for The Verdin Company, a Cincinatti-based family business that’s worked on this iconic UNI landmark for more than 70 years, that pride is more personal.

The Verdin Company dates all the way back to 1842 as a clockmaking company and later expanded to also work on bells. Over the years, the company has completed more than 55,000 installations at universities, churches, municipalities and businesses throughout the United States, and has made notable contributions to the bell manufacturing and clockmaking industry, such as crafting the first electric bell ringer nearly a century ago.

The Meneely Bell Foundry, which cast the original Campanile bells, had a close relationship with The Verdin Company for many years. In fact, when the Meneelys later went out of business, they gave their records to The Verdin Company. Because of this, when campus leaders wrote to the Meneelys in the 1960s about expanding the campus carillon, the bell foundry redirected them to Verdin. At the time, the company more than tripled the number of bells in the Campanile’s instrument, taking it from 15 to 47!

In the decades that followed, The Verdin Company performed periodic maintenance of the Campanile as needed. Then, in 2022, Verdin began an intensive renovation of the Campanile that included nine new bells, adding new notes to the instrument that had never been heard on campus before. 

The Verdin Company brought its traveling bell foundry — the only one in the world — to campus during Homecoming that year. The Panther community assisted with the casting of an additional,  commemorative Sesquicentennial Bell by passing ingots of brass that were melted down to pour into a mold and create the bell. 

The Verdins hauled the bells from the Campanile all the way to Cincinnati to provide the TLC the brass instruments needed.

When the bells returned to Cedar Falls alongside the new ones, Panther students, alumni and friends visited to get a once-in-a-lifetime photo with the bells before they were re-installed. The Campanile’s first 14 bells were on the ground for the public to see up close, something that had not happened since the Campanile was originally built in 1926. The largest bells had to be hoisted in the air by cranes and gently squeezed through the Campanile’s windows to be reinstalled.

“You guys should be proud of what you have, we’re absolutely honored to have a chance to work with you guys to do this,” said Tim Verdin during the reinstallation process.