Brattleboro, Vermont; 24 September 2024: The September episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast tells the story of how Jacob Estey and the Estey Organ Company put Brattleboro on the map and helped shape American popular culture in the second half of the 19th Century. Jon Potter of Latchis Arts narrates the podcast with a variety of organ and pipe music featured throughout. The Podcast is available for free on all podcast platforms at: https://brattleboro-words-trail-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/jacob-estey-the-estey-organ-companys-reverberations
The Estey podcast informs the September 26-30 EsteyFest 24 in Brattleboro. This national reed organ conference attracts hundreds to Brattleboro, site of the longest-lived and largest reed organ company in the world. The Estey Organ Company and the Estey family who ran it produced more than half a million musical instruments that traveled the globe with their prominent ‘Made in Brattleboro, Vermont’ stamp.
The story tells Jacob’s rags to riches tale, his remarkable ahead-of-his-time outlook, the company’s rise and fall and of the ‘little jewel’ of the Estey Organ Museum at the iconographic row of slate buildings that comprise the Estey complex a short walk from historic Downtown Brattleboro.
Dennis Waring, PhD, a Brattleboro area musician and author whose book “Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America” is essential reading for understanding Estey’s unique role in the rise of American popular culture, and an Estey Organ Museum founder, Barbara George, offer commentary.
The Words Project became interested in Estey because he was an early master of advertising – joining images and words together to sell his product. Estey’s prolific array of remarkably colorful and appealing posters and trade cards depicting elegantly dressed people in sumptuous parlors with fine carpets and draperies gathered around their reed organs are memorabilia still actively traded today.
Jacob and his family left a strong progressive impression on Brattleboro.. He underwrote construction of the women’s dormitory at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1874, the first building in the US for the higher education of black women. The Italianate style ‘Estey Hall’ is still used and admired today as the oldest building on campus. He also employed many women and was a champion of equal pay for equal work.
The podcast also includes information about Estey Company 30-year Vice President Levi Fuller, who would eventually serve as Vermont’s governor. He patented over 100 inventions, including international standard pitch, an innovation that was adopted by manufacturers of musical instruments throughout the world, one of the most important events in musical history. Fuller is buried with his wife Abby Estey Fuller, Jacob’s daughter, under the largest memorial in Morningside Cemetery. Jacob and the rest of the family are buried at the apex of Prospect HIll Cemetery, both in downtown Brattleboro.
The Brattleboro Words Project, which builds and manages the Brattleboro Words Trail, connects community members to the Brattleboro area’s unique history, the art of audio storytelling – and each other. It’s main focus is working with community members to produce audio pieces and maps for the Trail – a free GPS-triggered audio app and website which lead listeners on an audio journey of the people and places that make Brattleboro ‘America’s most storied small town.’ The Trail has won local and national awards for excellence and will be featured on the new Brattleboro Amtrak station which broke ground this Spring.
The Words Trail Project also produced “Print Town: Brattleboro’s Legacy of Words” a richly illustrated, book written by local writers and artists to document the history of the printing industry (and related endeavors) in the town. “Print Town” won the 2022 Indie Next Generation Award for Best Overall Design-Nonfiction.
For more information on how to participate in telling audio stories for the Trail, visit the BrattleboroWords.org website or call Lissa Weinmann at 917 239-8743.