The Samgin Brothers’ bell foundry in Moscow was one of the largest bell manufacturing enterprises in the Russian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a family business, which started working as early as 1783. The dynasty was founded by Nikolay Afanasyevich Samgin, the son of a merchant of the first guild.

It is known that in 1813 the factory employed 55 foremen and workers and had two smelting furnaces. There were a lot of commissions. By that time Moscow was recovering from the fire and looting. The first thing the citizens undertook was to work on the reconstruction of churches and monasteries, for which new bells had to be cast.

The brand name of the bell foundry bore the name of the owner: from 1783 to 1838 it was called Nikolay Afanasievich Samgin Bell Foundry, from 1838 to 1872 — Dmitry Nikolayevich Samgin Bell Foundry, and from 1872 to 1896 — Andrey Dmitrievich Samgin Bell Foundry. From 1896 to 1898 the company was called “The Samgin Brothers’ Bell Foundry in Moscow” or “Samgin Brothers’ Partnership”.

The bell from the museum collection was presumably mounted on the bell tower of the Cathedral of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The cathedral was originally built back in 1826, but it was repeatedly reconstructed afterwards. This is explained by the high seismic activity of the region and harsh climatic conditions. Archpriest Prokopiy Vasilyevich Gromov in one of his sermons in 1841 said,

Under Prokopiy Gromov, “three small bells” brought by the navigator Vitus Bering were preserved in the cathedral. According to the memoirs of Thomas Wallace Knox and Richard Bush, members of the Russian-American Telegraph Company expedition, there were about seven bells on the freestanding bell tower of the newly rebuilt cathedral in 1866. In December 1931 the Peter and Paul Cathedral was closed, and in 1935, a movie theater called “Polyarnaya Zvezda” was located in the building.