By Robert Stewart

(Granville, Mass.) Tre Cool of the band Green Day bought his favorite snare drum for $600.

If you’re listening to him, or to Phil Collins, Paul McCartney, Sting, Billy Joel, or Van Halen, chances are you’re listening to a drum made by Noble & Cooley.

They are mythic drum-makers, and their story is a very American one.

Noble & Cooley is Jay Jones’s company. “Our drums go to tape very nicely,” he says mildly. “They are solid wood, steam-bent drum shells. Drums made from cross-ply just sound like cardboard.”

At first, the company was a small New England start-up, manufacturing in the kitchen—of Silas Noble’s house, back in 1852.

Noble was a master mechanic. His partner, James Cooley, was Jones’s great-great-great grandfather. Cooley ran the business side. After two years of making toy drums, the partners built a proper factory in 1854. They made drums for the Union Army; these were Civil War times.

Jones himself used to trot over to the factory after school. “I was a 4th-grade pain-in-the-butt,” he admits. By the time he was 16, though, he spent his summers there, working the old machines from the 1870s that cut wood veneer, shaped metal, printed, steam bent hardwoods and mechanized assembly.

“A piece of wood that’s steam-bent has its own ring and pitch, and the pitch has real clarity,” he explains. “It takes 12 to 16 weeks and about 37 steps to build a drum from start to finish.” It takes that long because the wood needs ageing and curing before the drum is glued and assembled.

Just about all drums were built this way until World War II changed all that. Needless to say, computers aren’t involved in Noble & Cooley’s manufacturing at all.

The area itself is extremely rural. Granville is a little town in the foothills of Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains, not far from Connecticut. The remains of stone walls demarking fields farmed during the Colonial Period are everywhere. The soil around here is thin and “grows rocks,” which rise to the surface after the winter freeze and thaw. The rocks were “harvested” with the help of oxen, and used to build those stone walls.

It helps a potential drummer understand why Noble and Cooley preferred to leave the agricultural life behind and turn to making drums. Like many others of their time, they could have moved to New York or Ohio, where the topsoil was deeper.

Instead, like other Yankee problem-solvers, they noticed how much water flowed through the brooks and rivers, and used it for power. Water mills powered saws (as a former “pit-man” in a saw mill, I know how it feels to be covered with sawdust and sticky resin). Mills also helped grind grain, full cloth, mill snuff, and card wool. All this ingenuity helped make up for the lack of capital and people-power.

Noble & Cooley had that same spirit, and used water to power jigs and fixtures and a steam engine. By 1873, they were turning out 100,000 drums a year. In 1915, they added an electric generator. All of this equipment still works, and visitors can see it.

During World War II, Noble & Cooley made wooden reels for primer cord, and used paper and cardboard instead of metal to make their drums. When foreign competition started to heat up in the 1980s, they adjusted their business goals.

“We decided the world didn’t need another mediocre drum,” says Jay Jones. In order to pursue professional drummers, he simply refurbished the old machines from the 1880s to steam-bend the wood. They teamed up with the Avedis Zildjian Cymbal Company to create snare drums made out of their secret cymbal alloy. The very limited quantities of these drums make them very collectible.

These days, Jones’ son, Nick, works part time at Noble & Cooley. They still make drums, and on holidays they operate as a museum, where anybody can watch how the old machines still work. No computer de-bugging is required.

Tours—and drums—are available by appointment at Noble & Cooley. On July 4th, the staff will make a toy drum in five minutes, using 15 steps.

Robert Stewart is on the board of the Society for Industrial Archaeology.