Scan 366
The American history and encyclopedia of music …, 1908
4 lines. Read by computer on 10 September 2026. Printed page 318. See the scan on archive.org.
1and Paris, which goes to show that human nature has suffered no serious change in the century just past. Morris Steinert speaks of Crehore's little shop as the training school of such men as John Osborne and the brothers Lewis and Alpheus Babcock, who served their apprenticeship there. It was during Crehore's activities that the first upright pianos were made, but a serious weakness was their inability to stay in tune. Crehore failed after a few years, and when his apprentices, the previously mentioned Babcock brothers, and Thomas Appleton, a pipe organ manufacturer went into business together, he became a workman in their shop. This firm, which received an addition in the Hoyts brothers, importers of musical instruments, dissolved during the panic of 1819. The Bents, William and Adam, also were prominent musical instrument makers in Boston in the early years of the Nineteenth Century. A press notice of 1800 speaks of William Bent as an "expert mechanic" whose new grand piano attracted much attention. Mallet & Shaw was another of the early firms.
3The virtual founder of the piano industry in the United States — virtual because his instruments really were practical — was Jonas Chickering, of whom Hon. Robt. C. Winthrop proposed as a suitable epitaph: "He was a grand, square and upright man." Many of the prominent American piano firms have been founded by emigrants, a fact which also is true of France, the great French makers, Erard, Pleyel and Pape all having been foreigners. Chickering, however, was a thorough American. He was born in 1798 in New Ipswich, N. H., his father being a farmer and the village blacksmith. In his seventeenth year Jonas was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker. New Ipswich at that time possessed but one piano, an instrument made in London by Christopher Graner. Tradition has it that the piano once had belonged to Princess Amelia, daughter of George III. Whatever may have been its history, fate lurked among its strings and hammers. Some injury had befallen the piano so that it was not used and when the youthful Jonas, who
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