Mason & Hamlin Organ & Piano Company

The Mason & Hamlin Organ Company was founded simply as Mason & Hamlin in 1854 in Boston, Massachusetts, and is currently located at 35 Duncan Street in Haverhill, Massachusetts, making it one of the longest lasting of the original American piano manufacturers, along with the revered Steinway & Sons of New York. The company was established by first generation Americans Henry Mason and Emmons Hamlin, who sought to develop a business that specialized in producing only the highest quality musical instruments. Henry Mason (1831 – 1890) was himself a pianist and came from a family of musicians, including his father, Lowell Mason, who was a composer of hymns and a staunch advocate of music education in the public school system, and his brothers, William Mason, who was a composer and accomplished professional pianist, and David Mason, who was a professor of music at Columbia University. Lowell Mason also helped fund Mason & Hamlin as it established itself throughout the 1850s. Emmons Hamlin (dates of birth and death unknown) was a talented mechanic and had been an employee with George A. Prince and Company organ manufacturers in Buffalo, New York, where he worked to produce small reed organs called melodeons. While working for Prince’s company, Hamlin developed a method for voicing reeds or, in other words, altering their timbre so as to imitate other orchestral instruments, much as pipe organs were capable of doing. As such, when Mason & Hamlin first formed, their initial goals were to produce a series of sophisticated harmoniums, which they dubbed organ-harmoniums, that employed Hamlin’s innovations. Their original designs placed the bellows of the instrument directly beneath the reeds and in a vertical arrangement; this design became known as the American-style reed organ and remained the standard model for all harmoniums employing suction bellows throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mason and Hamlin set up their first factory on Boston’s Cambridge Street, and within the next thirty years moved to 277 Washington Street and 154-155 Tremont Street in Boston. In 1888, the company changed its name to Mason & Hamlin Organ & Piano Company, which it retained for many years thereafter. Mason and Hamlin began by focusing their efforts on producing only a very limited amount of small instruments that exhibited high quality construction and craftsmanship. It did not take long for the small company to garner the respect of other well-established American and European instrument manufacturers, and by the late nineteenth century the company had earned the reputation that it maintained throughout the entirety of the twentieth century. Following the success of their first harmoniums, the pair expanded production into larger reed organs, including a series of ‘American’ cabinet organs, for which they received the highest honours at the Paris Exhibition in 1867. The company expanded significantly during the latter half of the nineteenth century, as well: between 1855 and 1861, Mason & Hamlin was producing approximately 400 organs per year but by the turn of the century, their annual output had reached nearly 10,000 instruments.

In 1881, Mason & Hamlin also decided to venture into piano manufacturing, beginning with a similar approach of small numbers and attention to detail that they first employed with their organs. In order to ensure that the same immaculate standards were met with their pianos, Mason & Hamlin employed the services of German contractor and designer Richard W. Gertz, who is recognized as having been a major contributor to piano making practices, pioneering groundbreaking devices such as the duplex scale, the screw stringer, and the tension resonator throughout his illustrious career with Mason & Hamlin. Prior to his involvement with Mason & Hamlin, Gertz had apprenticed with renowned European builders Blüthner of Germany, and Bösendorfer of Austria, and had also worked on a series of early Steinway pianos. Gertz’s father, who worked as Concertmaster for the Hannover Orchestra can be credited with introducing Richard to piano manufacture: Gertz’s father also sold pianos and operated a piano showroom featuring some of the most sought-after models of the time from manufacturers such as Blüthner, Bechstein, and Steinway, and allowed Richard to repair instruments that had been traded in. Gertz immigrated to the United States upon an invitation from William Steinway to work in their factory. By 1895, Gertz was in full control of the piano department at Mason & Hamlin and was elected president of the company in 1906, after also having served as chief judge of musical instruments at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. As they had done with their organs, Mason & Hamlin employed the highest quality materials, which made their pianos among the most expensive in the world to manufacture.

The Chicago-based piano manufacturers, The Cable Company, purchased Mason & Hamlin in 1904 and maintained involvement until 1924, at which point the company was sold to the American Piano Company and sold along other famed American brands such as Chickering & Sons and William Knabe & Co. As was the case with most industries, the stock market collapse and resulting onset of the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s signaled the beginning of a sharp decline in sales and a series of related financial burdens. Mason & Hamlin instruments in particular, which were already considered luxury items prior to the Great Depression on account of their high prices, craftsmanship, and materials, suffered greatly. Manufacture of Mason & Hamlin organs ceased in 1927 and, in 1928, the Mason & Hamlin trademark, along with all of the American Piano Company’s inventory and manufacturing equipment, were sold to the Rochester, New York-based Aeolian Corporation piano manufacturers, which became the Aeolian-American Corporation following a merger with American Piano Corporation in 1932, for nearly half a million U.S. dollars. Throughout the mid twentieth century, the Aeolian-American Co. held the rights to nearly twenty piano manufacturers in the United States. During the Second World War and following a temporary national hold on piano manufacture in 1942, military airplane and glider equipment was produced under the Mason & Hamlin trademark. Following the war, piano manufacture resumed and continued unaffected until the company was subsumed by the Sohmer Piano Company in 1985. Sohmer was purchased in 1989 by Bernard Greer, a Seattle-based businessman, and was relocated to a factory in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Greer reinstated the original Mason & Hamlin name, and sought to manufacture pianos that would resemble those of the pre-Depression era, which were to be built according to Gertz’s original designs, specifications, and call for materials. Greer filed for bankruptcy in 1996, and the company was acquired by brothers Gary and Kirk Burgett of Burgett, Inc. and PianoDisc, following a brief ownership stint with Premier Pianos one year prior. Mason & Hamlin pianos continue to be manufactured in Haverhill, which is located a mere 40 miles from the original Mason & Hamlin factories in Boston. Currently, Mason & Hamlin produces three pianos per week.