Category:Henry Kirk White (reed organ builder)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
References
[edit]- The Angelus. The Pianola Institute (pianola.org)."A Family Business Just across the road from the Aeolian Company, in Cambridge Street, Meriden, Connecticut, was the Wilcox and White Organ Company, founded in 1877 by Horace Cornwell Wilcox and Henry Kirk White. As an important local businessman and president of the Meriden Britannia Company, Horace Wilcox provided much of the $30,000 capital for the new enterprise, while Henry White and his sons brought with them great expertise in organ building, gained in part at the Estey factory in Brattleboro, Vermont. Since Henry White's first marriage was to Lucy Cornwell, it may be that there was a family connection between the two founding partners. ",
" Certainly the firm was run very much as a family business, with all Henry White's sons playing their part, and even his grandson, Frank Cornwell White, specialising as an engineer and developing many refinements of the Angelus, including the firm's reproducing piano, the Angelus Artrio. The photograph above, taken somewhere between 1902 and 1906, shows Henry Kirk White as an octogenarian, with his eldest son, James Henry White, his grandson, Frank Cornwell White, and his great-grandson, Henry Foster White, in the centre. ",
" Henry Kirk White was born in 1822 in Bolton, Connecticut and began his career as a piano and organ tuner, settling in 1845 in Colchester, where he worked in an instrument factory for one Denison Smith. Within two years he had set up in business on his own, manufacturing melodeons in New London, and in 1853 he moved the business to Washington, New Jersey, where he remained until the outbreak of the Civil War. From that point onwards, he took up tuning again, in the Philadephia area, and then in 1865, once the War was over, he took his family to Brattleboro, Vermont, where he became the foreman of the tuning and action department at the Estey Organ factory, his three sons also working there for a time. In 1877 the family moved to Meriden, and the new Wilcox and White Organ Company was brought into being. Gradually James Henry White, eldest son of the founder, took administrative control of the business, with his brothers active on the technical side, though both died relatively early in life, in the late 1890s. Henry K. White himself remained active in the firm well into his seventies, supervising the mechanical departments until his retirement around 1900. He died in 1907, at the grand old age of 84. "
Subcategories
This category has the following 2 subcategories, out of 2 total.