Estey Organ: Five Hundred Thousand Instruments from Brattleboro
Vermont
By the eighteen eighties, a small Vermont city on the Connecticut River had become one of the most famous addresses in the world of music. Brattleboro, Vermont was where the Estey Organ Company made its instruments, and Estey organs were in parlors, schools, and churches from Maine to New Zealand.
Jacob Estey had arrived in Brattleboro as a plumber, not a musician. In eighteen fifty-two he bought into a small melodeon company, and with his business partner H. P. Green he began scaling up aggressively. The arrival of the railroad in Brattleboro transformed everything. Suddenly instruments could be ordered by catalog and shipped nationwide. By eighteen fifty-nine, Estey and Green were producing thirty melodeons a week. By the eighteen eighties, the factory on Birge Street employed several hundred people and produced instruments that were shipped to Africa, Australia, Great Britain, and across the Americas.
Estey's pump organs were prized for their reliability in harsh conditions. Missionaries in remote regions requested them. Schools without professional musicians could use them because the bellows-driven reed organ required no tuning and tolerated humidity and cold that would wreck a piano. The company produced somewhere between five hundred thousand and five hundred twenty thousand instruments between its early years and its eventual closure.
The company was also a pioneer in workplace equity: Estey was among the first American manufacturers to pay women equal wages for equal work, and the skilled craftsmen it recruited from Europe, many of them Swedish, founded a neighborhood in Brattleboro still known as Swedeville.
Estey survived fires, floods, and the Depression before finally closing in nineteen sixty. The slate-shingled factory buildings on Birge Street are still standing. One of them is now the Estey Organ Museum, housing hundreds of surviving instruments. On a quiet day in Brattleboro, you can still hear someone playing one of the five hundred thousand.
