Pat McBean is nervous. She’s keeping an eye on the burly guy across the room while she gives a tour of the Porter Music Box Company and Museum in Randolph. The guy — a barrel-chested local cabinet maker — can’t take his eyes off the intricately inlaid and carved wooden music boxes here. He’s leaning closer to some of the priceless antiques and Porter’s own high-ticket creations on display in this sedate sitting room. McBean is about to demonstrate Porter’s priciest product — the $20,000 model — but something distracts her. It’s the carpenter, reaching across the red velvet ropes to open the finely-polished lid of an irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind item.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you not to touch that,” says McBean.

“Oh, you bet.” He steps back carefully, still admiring it all. “I had no idea these were so big.”

He’s not alone. While Porter music boxes are internationally known as the world’s only large disc-style models, most of us right here in Vermont are stunned at first sight of them. Lose the dresser-top jewelry-box image. These babies are huge. Some are coffee-table-sized, others take up as much space as a jukebox. And if the size isn’t enough to surprise you, the sound is. The music coming from these boxes is so resonant and pure, it can give you religion. A tour group last summer “jumped three feet back,” McBean says, when she started up a Hungarian rhapsody on a display model.

“When people come in, they’re just amazed,” says founder Dwight Porter, 46. “They hear it for the first time, and they go, ‘oh, my God, I thought it was going to be a little ballerina twirling around on top.'”

Perched on 10 picturesque acres overlooking Randolph, the company is a bastion of precise artistry in a rough-hewn patch of Vermont countryside. Begun in 1974 on $35 savings, the business is the brainchild of Porter, a native Vermonter. His love of the 19th-century craft began at age eight, when he was fascinated by an antique music box at the Shelburne Museum. 

The memory never left him. By 1973, with a South Royalton High School diploma and stints in clock and jewelry repair to his credit, he convinced Thetford music box restorer Lloyd Kelley to take him on as an apprentice. Within two years, he presented his first prototype at a trade convention. The model — put together with his wife, Mary, on their kitchen table — attracted just three sales, but that was encouragement enough. Porter plunged in.

He borrowed $25,000 and started tooling parts on machines he designed. He had to; his original parts suppliers, Swiss music-box makers, now considered the Yankee upstart to be competition. It was an exciting challenge for Porter, who claims he “always liked to do something no one else is capable of.” By 1978, the company boasted national distribution, and was commissioning the custom Italian cabinets it still imports. Today, the business manufactures three models on computer-run systems, sells 120 boxes annually, operates out of three buildings and runs a museum of rare and antique music boxes.

No question, Porter boxes make beautiful music. But with prices starting at $6000, who buys them? Downplaying the inaccessibility of his line, Porter claims his customers come from “every walk of life.” But he’s proud to list his more prominent buyers, including CBS reporter Charles Osgood, country-music star Tom T. Hall, schmaltz king Wayne Newton, and Myron Floren of “Lawrence Welk” fame. While sales are steady in the U.S. and Japan, the company’s bread and butter comes from cassettes and CDs that capture the sound from the Porter pride and joy: a unique twin-disc model.

These days, Porter leaves hands-on work to his 13 employees. But as an administrator and developer, his original fascination still drives him to build a better box. And because, as he explains, “there’s no gear book that tells you what design to use,” nearly all internal workings are made on-site. The company creates everything, from the hand crank that starts the music to the clockwork spring mechanism that keeps it going for 20 minutes to “the heart of the music box,” a metal comb that plucks punched-out projections on rotating steel song discs. Porter’s crew makes the discs, too, which sell at $60 a pop and range in taste from Sousa to Sondheim.

The effort is both a delight and necessity for Porter, who takes pride in overcoming the difficulties of building a specialized — if not obscure — business.

“If there’s a problem, you don’t pick up the phone and find out how to fix it,” he says. “There’s no one to call. You have to design the process yourself. So many trade secrets have been lost. We have basically revived a lost art.” 

This article appears in December 20 • 1995.