The seed of North Country Wind Bells began as Jim Davidson played with scrap metal on his small farm in the 1950s. He was attempting to mimic the sounds of the harbor bouys which sometimes guided him in the fog on his lobster boat on the coast of Maine. In the mid1970s as Jim and his wife May were looking for a new way to sustain themselves economically as they aged, they remembered the buoy bells Jim had played around with.
Love of land and water, imagination and a strong Yankee work ethic came together and North Country Wind Bells sprouted. It grew into a wonderfully healthy business which expanded to produce a multitude of buoy bells, then wilderness bells to evoke memories of other beautiful natural locations in Maine and beyond.
Jim and May gathered a small group of workers who produced and marketed bells near and far into the 21st century. In the early 2000s their daughter Connie and her husband Paul took over and continued and expanded both the line of products and their selling range.
Health concerns and aging equipment led Connie and Paul to make the hard decision to close their shop and offer NCWB for sale in late 2023.
In the summer of 2024 Ron and Peggy Davis of Waldoboro needed a replacement windcatcher for their 10 year old Nantucket buoy bell. They visited the showroom in Round Pond and learned that the business was for sale (and they bought a windcatcher). Intrigued and impressed with the bells and learning the story of the company, they quickly came to feel that the business should continue and that it belonged to and on the coast of Maine. When son Jim and daughter-in-law Mary came to visit they too were impressed and intrigued and offered to come to Maine to join their parents and run the company.
In November 2024 the Davises are relaunching this company and this website. We are another family, with gratitude for the past and with some new ideas. Accompanied by seasoned and new employees, building on the creativity and success of the original bell family and committed to offering the sounds of the winds in Maine expressed through metal, imagination, ingenuity and hard work, we move forward.
