C.F. Martin and the American Guitar

Christian Frederick Martin was born in Germany in seventeen ninety-six, trained as a luthier in Vienna, and arrived in New York in eighteen thirty-three with a craft and a company. Within five years he had moved his workshop to the hills of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, where the Martin Guitar Company has remained ever since, making it one of the oldest instrument manufacturers in continuous operation in the world. Martin's workshop on this street was built in eighteen fifty-nine and expanded repeatedly.

What came out of it changed American music: the X-braced flat-top guitar Martin pioneered in the middle of the eighteen hundreds gave the acoustic guitar the structural strength to handle steel strings, projecting the warm, full tone that would shape bluegrass, country, folk, and rock. The Dreadnought body style his company later developed became the standard against which every other acoustic guitar is still measured.