Kimball Piano and Organ Company

The Kimball Organ Company was established by William Wallace Kimball, an American reed and pipe organ manufacturer born in Rumford, Maine in 1828. While in his twenties, Kimball relocated to Decorah, Iowa, where he worked as a real estate agent and amassed a small fortune. In 1857, Kimball liquidated his investments and relocated to Chicago, Illinois, where he established the first iteration of his company as a small dealership that sold pianos – mostly squares, including those made by Hallet & Davis, F.C. Lighte, Emerson Piano Company, and Chickering & Sons – and reed organs. The company was first located on Chicago’s Lake Street, but soon moved to a location at 99 South Clark Street, where it operated from 1858 to 1860. It was then moved to the Crosby Opera House on Washington Street, which was later destroyed by the Chicago Fire in 1871. In later years, the company obtained a factory in Melrose Park, Illinois. In 1879, Kimball began constructing his first reed organs with an action produced by the J.G. Earhuff Company, and was soon in full production, with a chain of satellite stores opening throughout the Midwest and a head office at what came to be known as Kimball Hall in Chicago. The Kimball Organ Company was officially incorporated in 1882 and by 1888 the company had begun producing pianos, with production steadily increasing by 1889 to fifty pianos per week and fifty reed organs in a single day. On account of declining sales in reed organs that began in 1890 and steadily increased into the twentieth century, the company expanded its production at the turn of the century to include large-scale pipe organs, a series of theatre organs, player pianos, and phonographs. Kimball also began expanding its piano manufacturing, building a new factory dedicated solely to the instrument and hiring technicians and builders from Steinway & Sons and Bechstein.

The company ceased production of reed organs in 1922, having produced in excess of 400,000 units. When production of pipe organs ceased in 1942 – after having completed over 7,000 units – the company turned its focus solely to piano manufacture, obtaining a new factory in 1955 at 26th Street and California Boulevard in Chicago, and subsuming the revered Bösendorfer Piano Company of Austria in 1966. In addition to Kimball, the company also produced mid-grade pianos under the names Dunbar, Harrison, Hinze, and Whitney. Until the 1950s, Kimball enjoyed success as one of the world’s largest and most distinguished manufacturers of pianos, specializing in low-cost vertical pianos built for the middle class. In the mid 1950s, following difficulties that had arisen from the burdens of the Second World War and the Great Depression, the company began slipping into a financial crisis, which signaled the beginning of its slow decline and its subsequent purchase by the Jasper Corporation furniture manufacturers in 1959. In 1961, with the release of its first electric organ, the Kimball subsidiary of Jasper became known officially as the Kimball Piano and Organ Company and then as Kimball International, that latter of which also saw the company’s headquarters move to Jasper, Indiana and its piano manufacture move to West Baden, Indiana. The company enjoyed a brief renaissance as one of the largest manufacturers of pianos and organs in the world throughout the 1960s and 70s – an era that also saw the creation of the Imperial Bösendorfer, a grand piano with an impressive girth of 9 feet, 6 inches – with numbers reaching into nearly 100,000 units produced each year. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Jasper Corporation began producing furniture and electronics under the Kimball International moniker, establishing a basis on the already well-known and -respected Kimball brand. Kimball produced its last organ in 1983. Throughout 1995, Kimball International’s original instrument division focused its efforts on producing piano cabinets for other piano manufacturers, and in February of 1996 the subsidiary was discontinued. Bösendorfer production remained largely unaffected by this, and was sold back to Austrian owners in 2002. William Wallace Kimball passed away in 1904, at the height of the company’s commercial success, and was initially succeeded as head of the company by a series of relatives. The Kimball name still exists today in the form of the Kimball Electronics Group (KEG), a subsidiary of the Jasper Corporation that specializes in manufacturing electronic devices to a range of industries, as well as in the form of a home and office furniture segment.

In total, Kimball produced nearly 700 theatre organs through its history. Along with Kimball, other well respected theatre organ producers of the early twentieth century included the American Wurlitzer company, which produced nearly 2,500 theatre organs between 1914 and 1942, the American Bartola Musical Instrument Company, which produced several hundred Barton theatre organs between 1918 and 1931, the American Page Organ Company, which produced in excess of 100 theatre organs between 1922 and 1930, theatre organ inventor Robert Hope-Jones, who produced nearly 250 organs before 1911, the California-based Robert Morton Company, and the New York-based Marr & Colton Company. A number of traditional pipe organ builders also produced a limited amount of theatre organs, including the Canadian Casavant Frères company, which produced seven theatre organs among their many thousands of pipe organs. In the United Kingdom, the John Compton Organ Company and William Hill & Sons & Norman & Beard, which was commonly referred to simply as Christie, remained the most prolific manufacturers of theatre organs. Known primarily for its work in piano building, Kimball has been the recipient of numerous awards, including receiving the highest honour at the World’s Columbian Exposition that was held in Chicago from May to October of 1893, in recognition of the company’s high standards, efficiency, and aggressive marketing tactics.