I do not list American brands out of patriotic preference but because in the hundred-year period between 1820-1920, there was an explosion of piano building in America, so many of those 12,500 brands were American. This manufacturing explosion was scarcely interrupted by the Civil War. The economy of the North had been strong throughout the conflict and continued to grow after it.
Starting in the Northeast (Boston, upstate New York, and especially New York City), piano manufacturing moved westward through Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio toward Chicago.Ībout the time it reached the mid-West (ca. 1900), the explosion sparkled to a close, moving westward no farther because the population dropped off sharply beyond Chicago and transportation of materials further west would drive up the price beyond what the economies of the area could bear. For those living in far-flung areas of the U.S., however, help was coming, wearing a white hat. To the traditional shopping expeditions to Chicago or "back East" was added the mail-order catalog. The first documented mail-order operation was in 1499 in Italy (books), followed by catalogs for seed (England, 1667) and saplings (U.S., 1771). The ever-enterprising Benjamin Franklin offered a catalog in 1744, listing almost 600 books, which he offered "satisfaction guaranteed." After the Civil War, the population began to move west once more, swelled greatly by the refugee families from the South and unemployed soldiers from both sides of the conflict.
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