(A&SCRC) Square Roots: The Story of the 1880 Grand Square Piano Now on Display in the Arts & Special Collections Research Center

This post was written by music librarian Bethany Stewart, Ph.D.

In your first Fall semester foray to Moody Memorial Library’s third floor, you may notice a new tenant: a large and unusually shaped keyboard instrument. In short, our new resident wooden dinosaur is a square grand piano—which yes, is in fact rectangular and not new at all—built in 1880 and donated to Baylor Libraries fifty years ago, in 1973. Where did it come from? Where has it been lurking? Why is it rectangular… erm, square? Don’t worry—in this blog post, we will answer your questions and tell you (what we think is) a pretty great story.

The Holmsley Family

This piano was first owned by the Holmsley family of Comanche, Texas. The Holmsley family included Thomas (1834-1902) and Elizabeth (1839-1922) and their eleven children—for the sake of time, we’ll just name the four daughters who attended Baylor in the 1880s-90s: Lucinda (1866-1938), Arminta (1869-1938), Amanda (1872-1957), and Fannie (1874-1959).

When Thomas Holmsley purchased the instrument in 1880, popular music was not enjoyed through professional recordings – but largely through performances by family and friends at the home piano. And the end of the nineteenth century was, thanks to mass production of the instrument and thus more affordable costs, as Arthur Loesser writes, “the time when the [piano] was most useful, most esteemed, and when it gave the most substantial pleasure of which it was capable to the greatest number of people” (549).

Hip to be Square

Though the idea of a square piano seems unusual today, square pianos were the top choice for home instruments for nearly a century (see a square piano depicted on the cover of one of the biggest hit songs of the first half of the nineteenth century, , held in Baylor’s Spencer Sheet Music Collection). In fact, square pianos were common from the very beginning of the piano’s history—evolving from reconstructed clavichords (Dolge, 48). Over the course of the nineteenth century, square pianos evolved from small clavichord-like instruments to seven-foot-long lovable monstrosities, and many of these developments are thanks to an American company: Chickering.

The Chickering Piano Company was founded by Jonas Chickering in Boston in 1823. And by 1840, Chickering was the undisputed leader of the American piano industry. One of Chickering’s major contributions to piano manufacturing was made by 1837: he developed a one-piece cast-iron frame for the square piano which he patented in 1840. This allowed greater resilience in the face of extreme American weather conditions, and enabled higher string tension allowing for the use of thicker strings which created a richer tone and more power. He then adapted this cast-iron frame for grand pianos and thus “laid the groundwork for the American system of piano manufacture which, by the 1870s, was dominating the world market” (Hoover). Chickering’s square pianos won a medal at the London Great Exhibition in 1851, and by that time were being sold all over the U.S. In 1852, Jonas Chickering died and his three capable sons—Thomas, Frank, and George—took over leadership of the company.

With its sterling reputation and a newly built state-of-the-art factory, Chickering sought out connections with big name pianists to continue to build the company’s name and reach. In 1853, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the first American piano virtuoso, returned home from a European tour with two French Pleyel pianos. A couple of years later, Gottschalk was gifted Chickerings and spent the rest of his career with them; his admiration for the instruments is evident in his memoirs. Franz Liszt, to whom Frank Chickering presented a grand in the late 60s famously remarked, “It is imperial! I never thought a piano could possess such qualities” (Good, 226 and Loesser, 513).

Their star continuing to rise, Frank Chickering oversaw the opening of Chickering Hall in New York in 1875 to host a string of virtuosi, and the company sponsored a tour of pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow in 1875-1876. At a rehearsal in Baltimore, von Bülow was reportedly furious when he approached the piano to find a large placard attached to the audience-side of the piano with “CHICKERING” spelled out in gold letters (Hildebrandt, 140), but this was common practice even through the 1920s.

While Gottschalk, Liszt, and von Bülow played Chickering grands, the folks buying pianos for home use often bought squares that would more easily fit in their parlors. Upright pianos were then in production too, but at midcentury, “all American makers…devoted themselves more or less to the development of the square piano, so that it soon became superior to the upright piano as that was then constructed” (Dolge, 51). And, as James Parton wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867, “almost every couple that sets up housekeeping on a respectable scale considers a piano only less indispensable than a kitchen range” (Parton, 82; quoted in Roell, 23). And a high percentage of these couples bought Chickerings. Good says that the Chickerings’ sponsorships of virtuosi “paid off in sales to those who thought that if von Bülow sounded so good on a Chickering, it might make them sound better” (226).

Back to the Holmsleys: The Holmsley Family Orders a Chickering and Goes Green & Gold

So then it makes sense that when Thomas Holmsley looked to purchase the family piano in 1880, he ordered a square piano straight from the renowned Chickering & Sons Piano Company in Boston. (See an advertisement below, which is one of the means by which Thomas likely became familiar with the company).

The piano was shipped by water to Galveston, then by rail to Fort Worth, then by wagon freight to Comanche since the small town had no rail station at the time. Thomas’s daughters were between and 6 and 14 years old in 1880 and spent their remaining time at home playing the Chickering. Music making in the home was an expected feminine accomplishment, a sign of class status and marriageability, and a practical way for the family to entertain themselves and guests in the family parlor. And it is clearly something the youngest of the daughters, Fannie, enjoyed as she focused on piano when she attended Baylor in the following decade.

The Holmsley daughters would have played sentimental songs, comic songs, topical songs, songs of previous generations and songs straight from the publisher. Songs that enabled play, laughter, dancing, tears, and pantomime. 30,000 examples of such songs are held as part of our Spencer Sheet Music Collection, which give amazing insight into the lives, ideas, and tastes of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Americans. And our period square piano enables us to understand their experience, embodiment, and reception of the music—how they made, played, felt, saw, and heard it.

In the 1880s-90s, Lucinda, Arminta, Amanda, and Fannie Holmsley each in their turn traded their comfortable home and family piano for a room at Burleson Hall to study at Baylor University. Baylor was ahead of its time regarding co-educational learning. Women were permitted full enrollment at Baylor beginning in 1886, and men and women students could enroll in the same classes, attend the same chapel services, and participate in some of the same extra-curricular activities.

Their experiences were by no means equal, though (to learn more about women at Baylor around the turn of the century, see a blog post from former Baylor student Chelsea Cichocki here). In line with trends in coeducational institutions at this time, traced by John Thelin, many women who attended Baylor were enrolled as “special students,” completing courses but without any intention to graduate. And though they had their choice of coursework, domestic science and fine arts were particularly marketed to women. Many women were, as historian Maresi Nerad has argued, limited to the “academic kitchen” of university life and study.

The youngest of the four Baylor Holmsleys, Fannie, attended Baylor as a special student from 1893-1895, and her primary area of focus was “Piano Forte” (see University Catalogue from 1894-95 in the digital collection). In the Fall of 1893, Fannie was enrolled in rhetoric, English classics, piano, vocal lessons, and theory. That next spring semester she took rhetoric, American classics, arithmetic, Texas history, piano, and theory. She took English lit, harmony, art, vocal lessons, and piano in Fall 1894, and the following spring she took art and three music courses. Throughout her time at Baylor, she was active in leading the Rufus C. Burleson (RCB) Society, named after the then Baylor President.

A primary way in which Baylor women could supplement their education outside of the classroom during this time was membership in either the Calliopean Literary Society or the RCB Society. “The women in these societies competed in literary debates, performed in plays and concerts, collaborated with one another, and planned events with other women, men, and faculty members… thereby enriching their collegiate experiences” (Scott, 1989, quoted by Cichocki). Participation, not to mention leadership, in these societies was a huge undertaking and difficult to juggle on top of coursework, but impossible to manage if a student also had to also work to earn a wage (Cichocki).

When Fannie finished her stint at Baylor in 1895, she returned home to Comanche and married Robert Hartwell Moore from another prominent local family. Fannie’s father Thomas gifted Fannie the Chickering square piano as a wedding present. The piano was moved into Fannie and Robert’s new home, and it would remain with Fannie for the rest of her life.

The End of Squares

From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, we know the square piano’s reign eventually ended—so what happened? Well in short, it was the choices of companies like Chickering that gradually led to the square’s demise. Over the course of the century, as we’ve seen, piano makers increased the size of square pianos, from about six feet long in the 1850s to about seven feet long in the 1870s. Because of the gradual change in home floorplans and tastes later in the century, and because of improvements to the smaller upright piano in the 1870s, the square’s days were numbered. England and France had made their last square pianos in the 1860s. In the U.S., production ended in 1905, a death which was hastened by piano dealers themselves.

Why? Well first, piano companies were frustrated. The abundance of square pianos (used and new) still circulating were driving down the value of uprights and grands. In 1903, the front page of the National Association of Piano Dealers of America’s trade journal ran an extreme headline: “Burn the Old Squares at the Atlantic City Convention.” The article proposed that at their upcoming Atlantic City Convention, the over 400 members of the association each bring three to five old square pianos to stack and burn (Hettrick).

And on May 24, 1904, the stunt took place. The next morning’s Musical Age Daily reported:

Brilliant, thrilling and sensational was the burning of a thousand old square pianos on Chelsea Heights near Atlantic City at ten o’clock last night. The mountain of instruments towered in the form of a pyramid fully fifty feet in height, and when the torch was applied the neighborhood for a mile or more around was brilliantly illuminated, and the high buildings between the fire and the Steel Pier, alone prevented the hundreds of spectators on that structure from seeing it. However, the glow of the flames on the sky could be plainly seen, and the piano men knew that one of the obstacles to their greater prosperity was going up in smoke; but it meant more than this for the burning of these old square pianos was symbolic of their complete passing out of the sphere of usefulness whether musical or commercial (p. 4, quoted in Hettrick).

While the square’s impact on piano values was the main excuse for the stunt, scholar William Hetrick has added additional motives: “Think of the advertising the trade would get out of the incident! Think of the crowds that would gather to witness so novel a spectacle! Think of the way the old squares would afterward be regarded!” (Hettrick). Their hope was that the square’s reputation would be so tarnished, that every parlor boasting a square piano would need to be outfitted with a new upright or grand.

As for the Chickering company, in 1853, the same year Chickering reached its zenith with the completion of their new gargantuan factory, and just a couple years after its London win, a small rival shop was set up in downtown New York under the name of Steinway. By the next year, Steinway began winning awards, first at the Metropolitan Fair in Washington D.C. then at the Crystal Palace trade fair in New York. By 1870, Steinway had already pulled ahead in both production numbers and earnings (Loesser, 496). Chickering wasn’t beat yet—as we’ve seen they held their own in production and competitions for another two decades—but the company began to have financial problems by 1890 and with the death of the last Chickering son in 1899, the company was already in decline and was eventually absorbed by another company.

The Holmsley Square Comes to Baylor

But our Holmsley Chickering was safe from bonfires and tarnished reputations, from company absorption and upright competition. Our piano remained in Fannie’s home until just before her death in 1959. Fannie and Robert’s four sons, Robert, Jack, Jefferson, and Fred Moore grew up with the instrument and Fred remembered it fondly as a centerpiece of life in their home—it was in continual use for over ninety years.

And eighty years after Fannie left home for Baylor, her piano did too. In 1972, Fred was determined to find a good home for their beloved family heirloom. He said that his mother “had always felt close ties to Baylor, and that Baylor and memories of it were always dear to her” (Waco News Tribune). He believed that Fannie would have been pleased with the decision to have the piano permanently on Baylor campus.

Since Moody Library is also the home of a renowned collection of almost 30,000 pieces of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century sheet music in the Spencer Sheet Music Collection, library staff and university administration were eager to accept a gift so fitting to our existing research strengths.

Initially a special “treasure room” was created to house the piano on the third floor of Moody Library. Funds to outfit the treasure room in period decor were also donated by Fred Moore and matched by his long-time employer, Mobil. The room was dedicated in a special ceremony in April of 1973.

At that time, the then-named Crouch Music Library was confined to only one small area within the library. The entire collection of sound recordings and printed music, along with staff offices, study areas, and playback equipment fit into the same area that housed the treasure room. With shifts in Baylor’s student population, technological needs, and collection growth, the treasure room’s time was limited.

By the 1990s, other fine arts materials were moved up to join the music collection and the third floor housed over 100,000 items. But more than just space needs, the needs of the student population changed. As technology advanced and Baylor’s arts enrollment rose, the library felt a keen responsibility to accommodate their needs through new spaces and equipment, adding a twelve-station computer lab and an additional seminar room.

These changes—mostly good changes—eventually led to the dismantling of the treasure room in 1996. The Holmsley piano was moved, first to the office of the then music librarian, then later to a storage room until a better situation was dreamed up that would simultaneously continue to serve the needs of our students, honor the Holmsley Moore’s gift, and enable the instrument to help us understand music history and performance practice ever better.

It is in that spirit that our Chickering square piano has been moved out of the shadows and back into the light. With a fresh tuning, plans are in the works to integrate the instrument into research, engagement, and outreach programming starting this academic year.

So you stay tuned too, because it won’t be long until you’ll be able to experience the popular music of Victorian and Gilded Age America just as they would have played it on their instrument of choice, through our “Concerts on the Square” series.

 

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Bibliography

Baylor University Archive – The Baylor Bulletin, Baylor University

Chickering Advertisement. The Galveston Daily News (Jan 11, 1867): 4.

Cichocki, Chelsea. “Co-Education at Baylor University: Constraints on Women’s Access to Education, 1900-1920.” Accessed July 8, 2024. https://blogs.baylor.edu/hesabaylorhistoryproject/x/.

Dolge, Alfred. Pianos and Their Makers. Covina, CA: Covina Publishing Company, 1911.

“Fannie Holmsley Moore Room Dedicated at Baylor” The Waco News Tribune (April 19, 1973): 2A.

Freund, Harry Edward. “Burn the Old Squares at the Atlantic City Convention.” The Musical Age (November 7, 1903).

Good, Edwin M. Giraffes, Black Dragons, and Other Pianos. 2nd Edition. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

“Harry Edward Freund’s Great Square-Piano Bonfire: A Tale Told in the Press” Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society 30 (2004): 57-97.

Haupert, Mary Ellen Patnaude. “The Square Pianos of Jonas Chickering.” PhD Dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, 1989.

Hettrick, William E. “The Bonfire Still Smolders.” Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society (2010), 183–85.

Hildebrandt, Dieter. Pianoforte: A Social History of the Piano. Translated by Harriet Goodman. New York: George Braziller, 1988.

Hoover, Cynthia Adams. “Chickering.” In Grove Music Online, January 20, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.05571

Loesser, Arthur. Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954.

The Musical Age Daily (May 25, 1904), reprinted in TMA 46, no. 4 (May 28, 1904): 87.

Nerad, Maresi. The Academic Kitchen: A Social History of Gender Stratification at the University of California, Berkeley (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999).

Parton, James. “The Piano in the United States.” The Atlantic Monthly 20 (July 1862). https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1867/07/the-piano-in-the-united-states/629351/.

Roell, Craig H. The Piano in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Spencer Sheet Music Collection, Arts & Special Collections Research Center, Baylor University

Thelin, John R. A History of American Higher Education. 2nd Edition. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011.