"The former Estey Organ Company factory complex in Brattleboro, Vermont holds
national significance both for its historical role in the United States organ
industry and its unique architectural character. By the turn of the twentieth
century, the family-owned Estey complex had expanded to become the largest organ
factory in the world. The company economically dominated the community of
Brattleboro and ranked among the largest industries of Vermont. Its owners and
employees contributed numerous inventions in the techniques and components of
organ building, and were prominent participants in the political and social
affairs both of Brattleboro and Vermont. At its ultimate development, the Estey
factory comprised nearly thirty buildings, among which a core of seven were
given the unusual exterior sheathing of slate shingles. Those seven buildings
remain intact and constitute an outstanding rhythmic uniform facade line along
Birge Street, the public approach to the complex. This array of slate-sheathed
buildings, of similar scale and massing, is unrivaled in the State.
The founder of the company, Jason Estey, entered the organ business somewhat
by chance and after it had been established in Brattleboro by its pioneers -
including Samuel H. and Joseph L. Jones, Riley Burdett, and Silas M. Waite. The
Jones brothers actually founded the organ industry of Brattleboro when, in 1846,
they started making melodeons (a variety of small reed organ) in a rented
gristmill. Riley Burdett, a prolific inventor of organ components, joined the
firm the following year. Late in 1850, a successor firm rented space in a
building owned by Jacob Estey, who then conducted a successful pump and lead
pipe business.
Born in 1814 across the Connecticut River in nearby Hinsdale, New Hampshire,
Estey moved to Brattleboro in 1835 and took over an existing plumbing business.
Early in 1852, he obtained Riley Burdett's share in the melodeon business
(possibly to satisfy a claim for unpaid rent). "Mr. Estey was no musician, but
his insight told him that the musical instinct was just awakening in the
American people, and that the business had in it promising possibilities."(1) In
March-April 1853, the firm built the first large reed organ made in Brattleboro,
the forerunner of the hundreds of thousands that would follow during the
phenomenal expansion o£ the Estey business.
The first simple reed organs in the United States were introduced early in
the nineteenth century. According to Gellerman, "the reed organ uses a 'free'
reed, which is fixed at one end and free to vibrate at the other, as opposed to
the 'beating' reed commonly used in pipe organs."(2) Prior to 1846, Gellerman
estimates, fewer than 300 reed organs had been built in the United States, the
products of hand craftsmen working in small shops.
In 1855, Estey bought out his partners for $2,700 and devoted himself to his
new enterprise. The small workshop had eight to ten employees, who produced six
or seven melodeons per month. Estey himself became the traveling salesman,
driving wagonloads of the instruments all over northern New England for sale at
$75 to $225 or barter for saleable farm products or animals.
Two years after Estey took over the company, fire destroyed the first
workshop located at the foot of Main Street beside Whetstone Brook. A larger
replacement, constructed across the street, also burned in 1864 but was rebuilt
on the same site. The next year Estey with three partners (including Riley
Burdett) formed a new company under his name and established a branch in
Chicago. Early the following year, however, that partnership dissolved, with
Burdett taking the Chicago branch and Estey retaining the Brattleboro property.
By this time, the reed organ had begun a spiralling ascent in musical
popularity in the United States. Its moderate cost compared with the piano and
the increasing affluence of the public led to an annual domestic production of
15,000 instruments by the middle 1860's. Responding to this demand, Estey
continued to expand his operations. Early in 1866, he took into partnership both
his son, Julius J. Estey (1845-l902), and his son-in-law of one year, Levi K.
Fuller (1841-1896), thereby creating a triumvirate that directed the company's
operations until the senior Estey died in 1890.
The same year (1866), the company moved to a larger factory farther upstream
along Whetstone Brook, and within three years its workforce increased to 170.
The great flood of 1869 interrupted the progress by sweeping away most of the
firm's lumber and threatening the factory itself. At that point Jacob Estey
decided to make what proved his last move to a new site well above the reach of
the brook.
The tract along Birge Street contained sixty acres, ranging up the hillside
(an area later called "Esteyville") from a prominent terrace where the new
factory would stand. During 1870, the first four slate-sheathed buildings (later
numbered 3 through 6 by the company) were constructed fronting Birge Street
along with an equally large "dry house' (for drying lumber) to the rear. The new
shops were occupied in the fall of the year and enabled a substantial increase
in monthly production to 250 organs, whose prices then ranged from $50 to $750;
the number of employees rose to 225.
Apparently, however, the burgeoning demand for organs almost immediately
outstripped the capacity of the new factory. The next year, two more
slate-sheathed buildings (Nos. 1 and 2) were added to the row. At the beginning
of 1872, the company employed 350 persons and produced 500 to 600 organs per
month. Still the expansion continued: later that year, the seventh
slate-sheathed building (now part of the enlarged No. 7-8) was constructed at
the north end of the row, and monthly production increased to 700 instruments.
The eighth slate-sheathed building was added to complete the row the following
year.
Through this period of continuous expansion, Jacob Estey found time to engage
in other activities, including politics. In 1869-70, he represented Brattleboro
in the Vermont General Assembly; then for the 1872-74 term, he advanced to the
State Senate to represent Windham County. During the first year of Estey's
Senate term, the Legislature approved an act of incorporation for the Estey
Organ Company, with the senior Estey as president, Levi K. Fuller as
vice-president, and Julius J. Estey as secretary and treasurer.
Jacob Estey also pursued his religious interests, for which he became known
as Deacon Estey. A life-long Baptist, Estey belonged to the Brattleboro church
for fifty years, and contributed substantially to Baptist churches in several
other towns to assist their efforts at spreading the faith. Similarly he
assisted the establishment of Vermont Academy, a preparatory school in Saxtons
River, Vermont, and subscribed much of the cost of Estey Seminary (later called
Estey Hall) on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. (Estey
Hall was constructed in 1872-74 as probably the first building in the United
States intended specifically for the high education of black women; it was
entered in the National Register of Historic Places on May 23, 1973.)
In 1880, only ten years after the opening of the Birge Street complex, the
Estey company produced its 100,000th organ. Estey production apparently reached
its historical peak during that same decade. In 1882, output ranged between 1600
and 1800 organs per month, and the company's sales exceeded $1,000,000. A
newspaper article from that year notes that the firm had more than 500
employees, many of whom were women who were paid equally with men for the same
work.
To augment its flourishing domestic market, the Estey firm extended sales to
many foreign countries. By 1876, forty organs were being shipped to Europe every
week. A Gazetteer and Business Directory of Windham County, Vt. published in
1884 exclaimed that "the extensive organ business in Brattleboro has made for
the village a world-wide fame, and the music of its organs probably is heard
to-day in every civilized country on earth."(3)
Estey's resourceful vice-president, Levi K. Fuller, contributed significantly
to that international reputation by becoming a leading authority on musical
pitch. Largely through his efforts, musical instrument manufacturers in the
United States adopted in 1891 a standard musical pitch. Fuller also contributed
substantially to contemporary mechanical progress, accumulating more than 100
patents for his inventions especially in the field of railroad equipment. And he
surpassed Jacob Estey in politics, being elected successively to the Vermont
Senate in 1880, the lieutenant governorship in 1886, and ultimately the
governorship of Vermont in 1892.
The company continued to expand and improve its factory complex throughout
the remainder of the nineteenth century. In 1882, a large brick dry house or
kiln (now demolished) was constructed, after which the existing dry house was
converted to an additional shop for milling lumber. (At that time, the firm used
four carloads per week of black walnut alone for making organ cases.) Other
buildings in the complex included (by 1884) "a storehouse, one hundred feet
square; an engine house, containing seven large boilers and a Corliss (steam)
engine of one hundred and fifty horse-power; and other outhouses for various
purposes, including a building in which is kept, for ready use, two steam
fire-engines . . ."(4)
In 1888, Jacob Estey witnessed the production of the 200,000th Estey organ.
But the founder of the company died two years later, leaving the presidency to
his son, Julius J. Estey. Julius' sons, J. Gray (1871-19--) and J. Harry Estey
(1874-1920), became in turn vice-president and treasurer respectively. Like his
father, Julius Estey engaged in politics, representing Brattleboro in the
Legislature in 1876 and then advancing to the State Senate in 1882. But his
overwhelming avocational interest related to military affairs. In 1874, he
organized a National Guard company called the Estey Guards in Brattleboro
(promptly complemented - if not rivaled - by the Fuller Light Battery company
that Levi Fuller founded the same year). Estey was promoted in 1892 to the rank
of brigadier-general in the Vermont National Guard (and served, beginning the
same year, under the administration of Governor Levi Fuller).
The Estey Organ Company also achieved probably the zenith of its public
prominence in 1892. On August 17th of that year, "in the presence of the
Governor of the State and his staff, and of other distinguished Vermont citizens
(including the Hon. Hugh Henry of Chester), of the company's five hundred
workmen and their families, of its agents in many places, of members of other
leading concerns in the music trade, of a large representation of the press, and
- best of all - of a great assemblage of the company's fellow townsfolk, the
Estey Organ company held exercises fittingly commemorating the production of the
250,000th organ at its work in this place."(5) Ironically, this event also
marked the peak of the reed organ's popularity in the United States; pianos were
already beginning to displace organs, especially in the cities. The Estey
management did not overlook that trend: in 1885, the Estey Piano Company was
established in New York, and by 1892 its productive capacity had been doubled to
250 pianos per month.
With the turn of the twentieth century, the Estey management made another
decision that reflected the decline of the reed organ. In 1901, the company
introduced its first pipe organs, and installed the first production instrument
in the Brattleboro Methodist Church. The following year, the overscaled Building
No. 26 was constructed to provide a suitable hall for the assembly and testing
of large pipe organs prior to shipment. Also in 1902, the next Estey generation
transition occurred when Julius Estey died and his son, J. Gray Estey, succeeded
to the presidency.
Another major addition to the factory complex occurred in 1906-07 when the
northernmost pair of slate-sheathed buildings (Nos 7 and 8) were enlarged and
joined. The resulting building, numbered simply 7-8, was sheathed entirely with
slate shingles to match the other buildings in the Birge Street row.
By 1916, the company's business became divided about equally between reed and
pipe organs. Prior to the disruption caused by the First World War, more than
half of the remaining reed organ production had been exported, with most of it
going to Europe and Australia.
During the 1920's, the pipe organ apparently became the dominant product of
the Estey company. A son of J. Gray Estey, Jacob P. Estey, had joined the
management of the company by 1925, when he described the firm's contemporary
operations in a speech. Between 75 and 100 companies were then building pipe and
reed organs in the United States. Estey declared that his firm was the only one
in the industry that made every part used in its instruments. At that time, the
company employed a network of salesmen and service technicians throughout the
country, and maintained retail salesrooms in New York and Boston. The factory
complex reached its greatest expansion - containing 250,000 square feet of floor
area - and a company booklet from the period describes it as "the largest and
best equipped (organ) factory in the world."(6)
But the prosperity of the 1920's did not endure, and with the Great
Depression the organ market collapsed. In May 1933, the Estey Organ Company,
whose sales had dropped from $600,000 to $200,000 per year, was adjudged
bankrupt and the factory was closed. The following September, the Estey family
sold the assets of the company to an outsider, thereby breaking the eighty-year
tradition of Estey ownership. Later the same year, a new corporation was formed
with Jacob P Estey as president, and about 60 employees returned to the factory
with equipment being concentrated in a few buildings.
The company continued production on a limited scale until 1941 when the onset
of the Second World War brought lucrative military contracts. A new model of
organ - the portable chaplain organ - soon became the principal product of the
firm, with an out put of 500 per month 'The organs were accompanied by
production of ammunition and bomb boxes and pontoon bridges.
Another major corporate change followed the war when, in September 1945,
Jacob P. Estey and Joseph G. Estey together with another person repurchased the
company; the Estey brothers became president and vice-president, respectively
The firm then employed 165 persons, and had diversified its output to silverware
chests and phonograph cases along with organs (the latter including a new
Minshall-Estey model).
Four years later and for the first time since 1933, full control of the
company returned to the Estey family when Jacob P. Estey together with his
nephew, Wilson G. Estey (son of Joseph G. Estey), and his son-in-law, Robert
Cochrane, Jr , established a new partnership A brochure published probably circa
1950 advertises organ models ranging from a $60 portable to a $60,000
four-manual concert pipe organ. The text notes that cumulative production of
reed organs by the company had reached 440,000 instruments augmented by 15,000
portable organs and 3,000 pipe organs.
The restored Estey ownership of the company lasted only three years. In 1953,
Rieger Organ, Inc. of New Jersey bought the company outright, planning to build
the compact Rieger pipe organ then being made in Europe. The following year, the
company introduced electronic organs, the first ever built by Estey. By 1956 the
company had increased its workforce to 325, tee largest level in decades.
Concurrent with this apparent success, however, there occurred a series of
corporate and financial manipulations that undermined the company, and in 1958
the factory closed again with the firm being declared bankrupt.
A reorganization enabled the factory to reopen the following year with still
another new line of reed chord organs. Two thousand five hundred of the chord
organs were built in 1959, but toward the end of the year production of the
electronic organs was discontinued At the beginning of 1960, the chord organ was
the only model still being built at the Estey factory, and within another year
organ production ceased completely when the corporation (whose name was altered
to Estey Electronics, Inc.) removed its operations from Brattleboro to
California. In 1961, the 115-year tradition of organ building in Brattleboro
came to an end with the sale of the Estey complex to other interests.
Subsequently, the remaining buildings have been converted to various other
commercial uses." - National Register Nomination Form