Narrator Jon Potter of Latchis Arts in Brattleboro introduces Jacob Estey and the Estey Organ Company, builders of more than half a million musical instruments that traveled the globe with their prominent made in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA stamp. Jacob and his remarkable family, down through several generations, fed the dynamism and helped shape the personality of Brattleboro while playing a significant role in the history of American popular culture. Commentator Dennis Waring, who wrote the quintessential analysis of Estey's place in the history of American popular culture “Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America" is featured throughout the episode, along with varied and delightful reed and pipe organ music. Jacob Estey's early life of indentured servitude and poverty is described. His rise in business is profiled as well as locations of his various factories before building a row of iconographic slate covered buildings all in a row along Birge Street, a short walk from historic downtown Brattleboro. Barbara George of the Estey Organ Museum discusses the iconographic buildings and workforce. Assembly line manufacture, dedication to equal pay for women, worldwide distribution and testimonials, contributions of Levi Fuller are described. The drive to build bigger and more ornate instruments and how Estey "a master of words" led groundbreaking advertising and marketing with beautiful and distinctive posters and cards still traded today as well sheet music, books and hyperbolic descriptions of instruments are highlights. Estey and family's dedication to the First Baptist Church on Main Street in Brattleboro is discussed, along with Jacob's financing the first building dedicated to the education of black women at Shaw University in North Carolina. Changes in company structure through generations, manufacturing changes and the giant Estey pipe organ being played in new ways at the old First Baptist Church building now performance space Epsilon Spires is detailed. The episode ends with a discussion of the formation and highlights of the Estey Organ Museum, housed in the old Estey complex on Birge Street. An additional bonus segment on the sounds of the various organs narrated by Dennis Waring, edited by Sally Seymour taken from the Brattleboro Words Trail free app is also featured.
This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail podcast was written and produced by Sally Seymour and me, Lissa Weinmann. Original edits were by Sally Seymour, and podcast editing and mastering was done by Alec Pombriant. Jon Potter of Latchis Arts did the main narration. Dennis Waring and Barbara George provided commentary. The Brattleboro Historical Society and Dennis Waring’s book: ‘Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America’ were indispensable resources. Local writers Joe Rivers, Fran Lynggaard Hansen and Kevin O'Connor work on Estey also informed this episode. Thanks also to Lee Ha of Brattleboro Historical Society for help locating Jacob Estey correspondence for use in this podcast. Musical selections were mostly taken from pieces Waring features in a CD that accompanies his book, and some music is from Fats Waller’s pipe organ pieces from Jazz History Online( https://jazzhistoryonline.com/fats-waller/).
BRATTLEBORO WORDS TRAIL PODCAST
JACOB ESTEY AND THE ESTEY ORGAN COMPANY’S REVERBERATIONS
HOST:(Theme music plays) Welcome to the Brattleboro words trail podcast.
DENNIS WARING:(Organ Music plays) In the last half of the 19th century. This is a sound that was ubiquitous across America, whether it was in Chicago or New York City or in the prairies of Kansas. (more music) It's an Estey reed organ! (more organ music)
NARRATOR JON POTTER: The Estey Organ Company, and the Estey family who ran it churned out more than half a million musical instruments that traveled the globe with their prominent maid and Brattleboro, Vermont, USA stamp, before radios, movies, TVs and internet, family, home and entertainment happened around an organ or piano. Middle class families who couldn't afford a piano bought organs. Churches bought organs. The Estey Organ Company became the largest manufacturer of reed organs in the world. The organ company's founder, Jacob Estey, epitomized the American dream, a poor boy who used ingenuity and perseverance to become a business leader, promoter of social justice and philanthropist, recognized and respected throughout the world. He and his remarkable family, down through several generations, fed the dynamism and personality of Brattleboro and played a significant role in shaping American culture.
Throughout this podcast, we will be hearing the voice of Dennis Waring, a professor and Brattleboro area musician who also builds instruments like the Warin Harp made of corrugated boxes and other recycled materials. His book titled “Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs andConsumer Culture in Victorian America” is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the place of Estey in the rise of American culture.
WARING: The last half of the 19th century was a manufacturer's delight because industrialism was on the rise. New technology, machines, new markets were now available to those entrepreneurs that were clever enough and business minded enough to exploit it, and Jacob Estey was certainly one of the greatest manufacturers of musical instruments in the 50 years from 1850, to the turn of the century,
NARRATOR; Jacob Estey’s origin story created a deep ethical foundation for the success that came after. Jacob Estey was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire in 1814, one of seven children. His father Isaac Estey was jailed for failure to pay back loans on a failing lumber business. Jacob was sold at the age of four as an indentured servant to a nearby farm. Such ‘farming out’ was not an uncommon practice at the time, his father signed a contract that committed Jacob to work for the farmer until he was 21 Jacob ran away when he was 13, because, in his own words: “I thought they whipped me too much when I didn't deserve it.”
He fled to Massachusetts and was on the run for many years. At 17, he learned the plumbing trade as an apprentice in Worcester, Massachusetts. When his father died, he returned for the funeral and found himself free of his commitment. He crossed the river to Brattleboro and eventually cobbled together a deal to take over a retiring plumber's business.
WARING: Estey started out as a plumber. He opened his shop right next door to a small music store that made little melodians, tabletop instruments.Estey saw that people loved them because fthey opened up the world to otherwise pretty meager in existence. He decided that he was going to focus on these little reed organs. So as time went on, he developed his enterprise. Impressively, he was tenacious.
NARRATOR: Estey said, “I didn't know a note of music. Sometimes I took a boy along to play the organs, and sometimes I found someone in the vicinity to come into the farmer's houses and show them off. If I could get an instrument into a neighborhood, there was pretty sure to be a call for others.”
Jacob married Desdemona Wood in 1837 in Brattleboro. They had two surviving children, a son, Julius and a daughter, Abby.
Jacob built his first organ factory in 1857 where the Whetstone Brook meets the Connecticut River, the site of today's Brattleboro food Co Op. It burned to the ground. He rebuilt a larger factory across the road, in an area now occupied by Plaza Park. That too burned in 1864. He tried again further up the Whetstone Brook, but the flood of 1869 ruined the foundation and almost ruined Estey.
WARING: Well after these mishaps, he decided to go up above Brattleboro, and he built eight regimentally arranged buildings, each one covered with slate for fire considerations.
NARRATOR: Estey’s slate buildings run along bird Street, creating an iconographic image that belongs solely to Brattleboro. The buildings lie at the end of Elliott Street, across the Whetstone Brook, just a short walk from the center of the historic downtown. Barbara George has lived and worked in the Estey buildings and helped found the Estey Organ Museum currently housed there.
GEORGE: When people come to birch street, they maybe don't realize that that was all one big factory. The whole place was devoted to one product, and they made half a million of them.
WARING: Estey’s factory is noteworthy in its ultimate manifestation, and by arranging them cheek to jowl by each other, he was able to transfer materials efficiently from one building to the next. This was a step by step process. Henry Ford was fascinated by Estey’s assembly line process. Instead of one artisan processing the entire musical instrument, they were passed from specialist to specialist.
GEORGE: It was before electricity, so they had to use daylight and look at how the buildings were all separated, 40 feet apart, with Windows every 10 feet big windows. And a lot of that must have because these people were working with their hands at very small things, wood carving, metal work, that kind of thing. What's wonderful to imagine is in 1870, 1880 no cars. I don't think there were even bicycles at that time. So imagine six or 700 people arriving for work on this street, going into these big buildings, and what's good to remember too is that lots of them were women.
NARRATOR: He understood the essential role of women as members of the workforce and paid them on a par with the men in the company. Many Estey workers stayed on their whole lives. He made the land above the factory buildings available for workers to buy so they could build their own homes that developed into a village within Brattleboro, known as Esteyville.
WARING: I think his strength was that he recognized talent. He took time to find the very best technicians, to import them all the way from parts of Europe. In other words, Estey made musical instruments that were equivalent and beyond anything that was of the same type that was made in Europe, and this was a big deal in America. And Estey was one of the manufacturers that gave European manufacturers a run for their money.
NARRATOR: Estey hired 19 year old Levi Knight fuller in 1860. Fuller quickly helped improve manufacturing. He became vice president after six years, and remained for 30 sharing company leadership with Jacob's son, Julius J Estey, president of the company.
Fuller married Jacob's daughter, Abby in1865. They lived in a grand house up Canal Street. Today. The property is the pine heights rehabilitation center just across from Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. There is no doubt Fuller contributed heavily to the Estey Company's success. Levi Fuller patented over 100 inventions, including international standard pitch, an innovation that was adopted by manufacturers of musical instruments throughout the world, an achievement the maker of Steinway piano is called perhaps the most important in the annals of musical history.
WARING: An amazing fact back in the last half of the 19th century, este was shipping organs all over the world, India, certain parts of Africa, certain parts of China. This is only one of many testimonials just to substantiate how well these Reed organs were made, if I can quote Mr. Parmelee of Erzurum (Turkey) who took our Estey organ out with him 12 years ago, after his return to America: “We sent to Trabzom for it. It was brought again over the mountain, 600 miles on horseback. But with all this rough treatment and subsequent constant use, it has kept in perfect tune. Not a reed has failed, and no part has ever needed repairs, save only for the pedal, carpets and straps.”
NARRATOR: Early types of reed organs, lap organs and folding melodeons, used by traveling preachers and others were relatively unadorned. That all changed in the 1870s when Estey and others began to add high tops to the organs, sometimes with shelves mirrors and decorative wood carvings, whether for churches or homes, este did its best to convince buyers that virtue and prestige increased with larger and more ornate instruments.
(musical interlude organ)
NARRATOR: Estey led, not only in business, manufacturing of organs and worldwide distribution, but he was an early master of advertising and joining images and words together to sell his product. The explosion of printing in Brattleboro and nationally in the 19th century lent itself to production of advertisements, posters and trade cards. Estey’s designs for these were remarkably colorful and appealing, depicting sumptuous parlors with fine carpets and draperies and elegantly dressed people gathered around their reed organ, patriotic themes, children playing instruments and stand up, cutouts proliferated, and this memorabilia is still actively traded today.
WARING: Jacob Estey knew that words were powerful, and he gave his musical instruments particular names that provided status and clout to his prospective buyers, the boudoir, the Cathedral, The Gothic, the Philharmonic,the new Triumph,the Grand Salon. the linkage of a product with stimulating words can be quite intoxicating, and Estey was one of the masters of using words to describe his instruments and give them power and impressive demeanor. He used words like most extensive, largest, perfect, lead the world, highest grade, biggest, best, new improved, these were words that we still hear often today in modern advertising. Estey even went so far as to give the buttons and knobs and stops on his organs branding hyperbole, words like Vox jubilante, Fox, Humana, Bourdon del Sienna, Violeta, harp, Aeolian and viola. Damor. One commentator said that these were names inscribed as Yankee, Latin. A misjoining of Latin, French and Italian, nevertheless acceptable at the time because people who bought them didn't know anything about it, these appeal to people's sensibilities and were part of the thrill of sitting behind an Estey organ.
NARRATOR: Estey published lots of sheet music and books like “The Estey Organ Method”, which helped everyday people learn how to play and developed a shared musical repertoire for the country. The Estey company documented every aspect of the business in folders containing everything from initial letters of interest to a final shipping order. These records are now being archived and digitized for public online research by the Oregon Historical Society at their repository outside Philadelphia.
At one point, Estey was accused of appropriating the contributions of organ designer Riley Burdette Silas Waite brought the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where Estey prevailed. We can gain some insight into Jacob's personality in an 1883 letter, where he writes, “While Levi is quite excited about the lawsuit, it does not worry me at all if we are to be beaten, all right, But I am not going to worry about it.”
NARRATOR: Jacob was civic minded and highly devoted to the town of Brattleboro. He represented Brattleboro in the Vermont General Assembly and Windham county in the state senate. Many of his family members would also hold high public offices.
Perhaps his teenage years, fleeing an unjust but lawful capture made him sympathetic to the plight of black people, especially in the wake of the Civil War, he became associated with Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, through his work with the Baptist Church founded in 1865 Shaw was the first historically black university in the south, and first to open its doors to women. Jacob underwrote construction of the women's dormitory in 1874 the first building in the US for the higher education of black women. The Italianate style Estey Hall is still used and admired today as the oldest building on campus.
Jacob's wife Desdemona and their daughter, Abby, as well as Julius's wife Florence, were all leaders who contributed significantly to the social and cultural improvement of the community.
They channeled much of their progressive views through work with the church. Jacob was a founder and deacon of the First Baptist Church in Brattleboro, built in 1868 in the high Victorian Gothic style, which at the time had the highest spire and largest bell in the state.
Jacob died in 1890 his funeral procession drew 1000s of spectators down Main Street, as evidenced by photos at the Brattleboro Historical Society Jacob's Son, Julius J Estey became president of the company. (music)
With the popularity of reed organs beginning to wane, Julius turned to the production of pipe organs. Well known organ builder and inventor William E Haskell was brought from Philadelphia to head the pipe organ department. They built and sold more than 3200 pipe organs across the US and abroad. The company provided organs for many important locations.Estey also made over 160 theater organs during the silent film era.
Julius died in 1902 at age 57 Jacob gray Estey and Julius, Harry Estey, sons of Julius took over the business upon the death of their father by 1916 Reed organs and pipe organs contributed equally to the company's income.
A giant Estey three manual pipe organ is still very much in use at the old First Baptist Church now Epsilon Spires. The magnificent organ was given to the church in 1906 in memory of Julius J Estey by his two sons, Colonel J Gray Estey and Captain Harry Estey. The organ remains, for the most part, untouched and is one of the largest organs of its kind still in use today. Epsilon Spires continues to expand expectations of what this versatile instrument is capable of, with a focus on showcasing experimental and secular works. A small plaque beneath a beautiful stained glass window in the building donated by Abby Esety recognizes the Estey family's contributions to Brattleboro.
NARRATOR: During the Great Depression, organ sales dropped dramatically. The company went bankrupt, and assets were sold. In 1933 the company was reformed, although the production of reed and pipe organs continued.
The company experimented with various types of specialty instruments. During World War Two, Estey produced most of the folding organs used by US Army chaplains. In 1953 Rieger organ, Incorporated of New Jersey, became the majority stockholder in Estey Organ Company, ending the Estey family's control of the company.
Through the late 1950s the Estey Organ Company continued to manufacture primarily compact pipe organs in the Brattleboro facility. The company introduced its first electronic organs, designed by noted German sound engineer Harald Bode in 1954. After a number of corporate changes, the company now Estey Electronics Inc, moved to California, signaling the end of the reed and pipe organ manufacturing in Brattleboro in 1960.
(The Estey Organ Museum)
NARRATOR: Anything could have happened to the vacant Estey buildings, including the wrecking ball as befell so much infrastructure of the 19th century in the era of urban renewal. But it's still here, in large part because of Hyacinth Renaud, an entrepreneur who needed more space in his home for his 16 children, and who preserved this huge part of local history. After several changes of hand, much Estey related material went to Ned Phoenix, a musician and reed organ specialist who would later be the founder of the Estey Organ Museum,
WARING: The Estey organ Museum is not very well known, but one of those jewels in Vermont of small museums. And if one were to come to Brattleboro, come up to the factory, it's still there. It's still impressive.
GEORGE: Whenever someone was downsizing their home or moving, they would have this nice instrument, and they didn't want to throw it away, and They all said Brattleboro right on them. So they would call up Brattleboro, and there wasn't a museum, there wasn't even a historical society in those days….The Brattleboro Historical Society was formed 1982 I think, and they started accepting donations of Estey organs because it was part of Brattleboro's history. And they all said Brattleboro right on them, so they would accept them. And they stored them all over the place.
And when the Estey Organ Museum founded itself, they rented space in the factory and set up their exhibits with organs they began to accept. They chose the very best ones to put here in the museum, and you'll see it changes from year to year, but 15 or 20 organs in the main room here, all of which play and which we want you to play, and they range from early styles, from the 1860s all the way through to probably the 1940s. They all sound very different, and that's what's fun about playing all the different ones. But some of them are so striking because of what they look like. It makes all of us very happy when we see the museum full of families, people of all ages, people who play, people who don't play, all sitting at the instruments, making beautiful sounds and having a great time.
NARRATOR: The legacy of Jacob Estey and the Estey Organ Company continue to resonate today, as Estey organs are played in new ways and are loved by organ aficionados worldwide.
HOST: This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast was written and produced by Sally Seymour and me, Lissa Weinmann. Original edits were by Sally Seymour, and podcast editing and mastering was done by Alec Pombriant. Jon Potter of Latchis Arts did the main narration. Dennis Waring and Barbara George provided commentary. The Brattleboro Historical Society and Dennis Waring's book “Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America” were indispensable resources. Musical selections were taken mostly from pieces Waring features in a CD that accompanies his book, and some music is from Fats Waller's pipe organ pieces from Jazz History Online. Thanks for listening, and we look forward to seeing you next month on the Brattleboro Words Trail.
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