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William Benson Jr. is super into sleigh bells.
Benson collects antique ones in his Marietta home. He orders new bells from overseas — designed to his exact specifications — then secures them to varying sizes of leather straps, which he cuts in his basement workshop. When traveling for fun, Benson scans constantly for promising retailers, asking shop owners if they’d like to sell his bells. Eight or nine times out of 10, they would, Benson says.
“There’s just something about bells that make people smile,” he says. “And that makes me smile.”
With a product so associated with holiday festivities, Benson estimates about half his sales for the year are happening this month. Benson Leathercraft bells can be bought at roughly 80 stores and gift shops in 13 states and Canada, per the website for the second-generation business. The first was William Benson, Sr.
“My dad was born in 1924 and about 12 years later he started making leather goods for the local people up in a little town called Gowen City,” Benson says. “South of Shamokin. Blink a couple times and you’ll miss it.”
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Sleigh bells helped pay bills.
“He started in a chicken coop. It was semi-Depression era and things weren’t the greatest,” he says. “I came along in 1961 and about 10 years after that, I started cutting straps. My dad showed me how, and I started making bells.”
His father was prolific.
“At one time my dad was one of the biggest bell makers in the world,” Benson says. “He used to go through between 250,000 and 300,000 bells.”
The elder Benson died in 2017. Benson says his father’s Alzheimer’s took a toll on his longtime business. The younger Benson — who retired from Turkey Hill Dairy in 2023 — started the bell business anew. He says he considers it a hobby.
Benson sources his leather from Wicket & Craig in Curwensville. According to a video on that Clearfield County company’s website, it’s one of only two vegetable tanneries left in America. Benson says he prefers vegetable tanning to a chemical process. The resulting patina apparently appeals to people like a woman who — while refurbishing an antique sleigh — happened upon Benson’s handiwork at Snow and Ice Christmas Store in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
“She was thrilled to find the Benson bells because she just loved the authenticity of them,” says Snow and Ice owner Dustin Kline.
Benson says his bells do particularly well at tourist destinations like Gettysburg. Sometimes requests come out of the blue.
“I get some weird contacts sometimes. A couple years ago, I got an email that said, ‘Hello. I’m Santa Claus,’ ” Benson says. “I’m like, ‘really?’ But I kept reading.”
Turns out the man had encountered Benson’s bells at a shop in the Lehigh Valley.
“He goes around to orphanages and old folks’ homes and gives every person a bell,” he says. Benson says he sold small strips of bells to him basically at cost and threw in free shipping. It’s hard to upcharge Santa.
“He bought like 400 of these things,” he says.
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Benson gets occasional requests from musical groups seeking bells they can shake. There are instrument-specific manufacturers out there who make the type of sleigh bells found in the band rooms at most, if not all, Lancaster County high schools.
Solanco High School has four sets in the cabinet, said band director Scott Weyman in an email. Two are wood handled with felt backing and the others have hard plastic handles. Solanco’s marching band used the latter on the field this fall for a production of “Knuckle Concerto.” Weyman says the bells — plus other effects like a duck whistle and slide whistle — provided a little musical comedic relief.
“Sleigh bells can and should be used in any number of musical styles and idioms,” Weyman says. “Although you have to be tasteful and prudent in applying them, sleigh bells … are used in tons of symphonic music, popular music and percussion ensemble music well outside of the Christmas or holiday mode.”
McCaskey High School included them in the spring during a piece called “Choose Joy” by Randall Standridge, which pulls material from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” per John Johnston, director of bands.
Cocalico High School used them this fall in a piece called “Cenotaph,” says band director Matthew Haelig. Cocalico’s Wind Ensemble will bust out sleigh bells for the classic “Sleigh Ride” during a winter concert slated for 2 p.m. Dec. 15 in the high school auditorium.
The radio version of that song played in Kindred Collections as Benson showed off his bells in that Columbia shop last week. In fact, just about every song playing in the background while he spoke had some sort of sleigh bells worked in.
If you’ve seen the “Saturday Night Live” “Cowbell” skit, you may be familiar with a phenomenon similar to when you now hear a Blue Oyster Cult classic on the radio. Once you start listening for sleigh bells in Christmas songs, it’s hard to unhear them.
Sleigh bells were among the earliest instruments played in space.
Astronauts (and pranksters) Walter “Wally” Schirra and Tom Stafford snuck a little set of those — and a harmonica — aboard the Gemini 6 capsule in December 1965. They reported seeing an unidentified flying object. Then they said it appeared to be manned by someone in red and broke into a rendition of “Jingle Bells,” according to a recording that you can easily find on YouTube.
Long before sleigh bells were jingling through speakers, they had a pragmatic purpose.
During most of the year, the clip-clop of horses on roads gave warning to other travelers that someone was coming. But snow muffled that sound, making bells a key winter safety feature.
In the 1860s, A. Miley at 37 N. Queen St. in Lancaster advertised “useful holiday presents” such as robes (made from animals like buffalo, Australian opossums and wolves) along with plated and polished sleigh bells.
Benson says sleigh bells were a must-have when travelers set out on the long and winding cross-state journey that predated the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
“People used to take sleigh bells with them,” he says. “So, if they got stuck in the mud in the spring or the fall, a guy would come by and pull them out and they’d use that string of sleigh bells for payment.”
READ: Lancaster County Christmas memories through the years, from the 1940s to the 2000s
Uses have obviously evolved. Benson knows of at least one occasion where his bells foiled a teenager’s plan to sneak in after curfew. Some people want to put them on horses for show. Some people put them on dogs. Benson has seen a lot of YouTube videos that show how to train dogs with bells. So, he made the strip at the bottom of his bell door hangers a little longer. That gives dogs something to grab with their teeth while signaling a need to go out, he says.
Benson invests a lot of time thinking about how he can make adjustments. He’s added a stainless-steel option to his other finishes. He’s currently pondering adding strings of 15 bells — which would offer an option between his current strings of 10 and 20. Those would be for smaller horses and ponies. While he does think about such tweaks, Benson stays squarely focused on bells.
“Why not give the people what they want, that’s my theory,” he says. “Don’t try and reinvent the wheel.”
Sleigh bells made Lancaster County news reports in various ways over the years. Often it involved people waxing nostalgic about winters past. Then there were times like January 1884 when The Lititz Express reported a set of sleigh bells stolen near Brownstown Evangelical Church. The person who owned them “declined to involve the law” and instead reportedly gave the thief “a sound drubbing,” per the newspaper.
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