$45.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2801-7

Published: Fall 2003

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Copyright (c) 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Preface

"An institution," Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us, "is the lengthened shadow of one man." So it is with C. F. Martin & Company, maker of what are generally considered the finest acoustic guitars in the world. Remarkably, the company has held this distinction for over one hundred fifty years, testament to the uncompromising devotion to craftsmanship of its founder, Christian Frederick Martin. C. F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796-1873, based in a myriad of hitherto unexamined primary sources—scores of account books, hundreds of letters, and other unique archival materials (see Appendix A)—made available by C. F. Martin & Company, traces the history of this firm from 1833 to 1873, through Martin's career in America. Not strictly a biography, this book uses Martin to offer both a touchstone to the nineteenth-century music trade and a unique tutorial in the evolution of America's burgeoning nineteenth-century economy.

Martin's initial success as a guitar maker depended on the culturewide interest in the guitar and its music that had begun in Europe about 1800 and reached the United States a few decades later. By these years the instrument had acquired its modern, six-stringed form, and widely published "tutors" for the guitar promulgated a sophisticated technique congruent to the music of the European classical tradition. Eventually, the instrument even drew its own composers, Hector Berlioz and Joseph Kreutzer among them, and its own virtuosos, solo performers such as Fernando Sor and Niccolò Paganini (better remembered for his violin playing), who filled large concert halls. One Frenchman even coined a term for the European infatuation with the guitar. He called it la guitaromanie—guitarmania.

By the 1820s the guitar, like European classical music in general, had become à la mode in the United States as well, but on terms different from those across the Atlantic. Not many of the great virtuosos, for example, performed on these shores, and concertgoers outside New York and other large cities had fewer opportunities to hear the instrument on the stage. Instead, Americans stricken by the transatlantic strain of "la guitaromanie" adapted it to their own needs and interests. Less expensive and more portable than the piano, requiring different facility than wind instruments, the guitar proved a welcome accompaniment to the parlor songs, ballads, and popular operatic music that proliferated in Victorian America. By the 1840s the guitar, like the piano, violin, and flute, was a fixture in homes in which the performance of music marked a family's engagement with emergent middle-class culture.

This was the setting to which Christian Frederick Martin (1796-1873) brought his skills as craftsman and entrepreneur and in which his instruments eventually were judged the finest available. His story begins in Saxony, the son of a member of the cabinetmakers' guild. The young Martin followed in his father's footsteps but also wished to learn to make musical instruments, a craft he eventually mastered in Vienna under the tutelage of the renowned guitar maker Johann Georg Stauffer. After rising to foreman in Stauffer's shop, Martin returned to his home in Neukirchen to practice his craft. But in 1833 he followed the lead of many of his compatriots and immigrated to the United States, settling in New York City and quickly establishing himself in its vibrant musical life. In addition to producing a small number of guitars on the designs he had learned in Vienna, Martin imported large numbers of European instruments for both professional and amateur musicians and developed an extensive business in instrument repair.

In 1839, at the instigation of Heinrich Schatz, also from Saxony and an instrument maker, Martin moved ninety miles to the southwest, to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, near the large Moravian settlement at Bethlehem. This rural area had reminded Schatz of his native country, and Martin obviously concurred. By the late 1840s he was making guitars, now of his own design, on a full-time basis and marketing them throughout the United States. He showed remarkable initiative in developing new business contacts throughout the Midwest and South as well as in the Northeast. Handling his own advertising and correspondence, Martin capitalized on the nation's rapid geographic and economic expansion in the antebellum years. By 1860 his had become the country's premier guitar, eclipsing those of such rivals as James Ashborn of Wolcottville, Connecticut, and William B. Tilton of New York City, his main competitors for market share.

After 1865, spurred by the rapid expansion of capital initiated by the North's mobilization during the Civil War, Martin changed his business plan to accord with the supercharged economic climate. To expedite marketing and shipping, he established a close relationship with the New York musical instrument dealer and importer C. A. Zoebisch, to whom he sent almost all his instruments. In addition, in 1867, as his age dictated a gradual withdrawal from the more demanding aspects of his business, he formed a legal partnership with his son C. F. Martin Jr. and his nephew, C. F. Hartmann. C. F. Martin and Company, as the firm now was called, continued its relationship with Zoebisch, who worked tirelessly to keep Martin's guitars in the public eye, as well as to crush other competitors. At his death in 1873, Martin was widely eulogized as the country's most notable guitar maker, a reputation that his company maintained and extended over the next decades.
…
The archive of C. F. Martin's forty-year career is unsurpassed in its depth and richness. It consists of scores of accounting daybooks, ledgers, and other financial record books, and a great volume of business correspondence, both letters and bills. This archive documents various decades differently. For Martin's years in New York City (1833-39), for example, several large account books record in great detail his importation and resale of European musical instruments and his extensive musical instrument repair business. In addition, these accounts document Martin's first attempts to make guitars, though this was not yet his major business. Another record book reveals Martin's complex business arrangements with Charles Bruno, whom he took in as a partner in the mid-1830s. Another describes Martin's entire inventory in 1839, when he was about to move to Pennsylvania and contracted to sell his business to another New York firm. This document and other related ones provide an invaluable index of wholesale pricing in the music trade in the late 1830s.

For some unknown reason, though, the period from 1839 to 1850, covering Martin's first decade in Nazareth, is almost wholly undocumented. No accounting journal is extant, and only from the late 1840s are there any letters. Beginning about 1850, however, the documentation becomes remarkably full from both account books and, for the first time, business correspondence. The following decade was particularly important for Martin. During this period he refined his guitars' construction, settling on a new way to brace his instruments' tops which marks his lasting contribution to modern guitar design. The 1850s also saw the standardization of his guitars' dimensions and appointments, documented in one of the manuscript daybooks from this decade which lists hundreds of his instruments, with their sizes and ornamentation recorded in great detail. By this point Martin was almost exclusively a guitar maker, no longer importing instruments, and repairing only those of his own manufacture if returned for that purpose.

The remarkable archive of business correspondence with firms all over the eastern United States, hundreds of letters and bills, records the story of Martin's embrace of the "market revolution" that transformed the American economy from a regional to a national entity. At this time a revolution in transportation that permitted the relatively inexpensive and dependable transfer of goods west to the Mississippi River, south to the Gulf Coast, and, soon thereafter, across the continent, opened important new markets for savvy entrepreneurs. The letters detail how Martin brokered his own instruments through scores of middlemen in these regions with whom he kept in almost weekly contact and who received his goods via the new "express" agencies that expedited shipment over long distances. Virtually on a daily basis, he personally addressed the needs of anyone interested in music: owners of large urban music houses, well-known performers, music instructors at private academies and in city studios, even amateur players who wrote of their special needs in instruments. Supplemented by detailed account books and records of his transactions with local banks, Martin's correspondence demonstrates how the "American system" of canals, railroads, steamboats, and banks, along with the express companies that linked them all, enabled an entrepreneur to cultivate a national market for his goods.

In the 1850s Martin battled for supremacy in the guitar world with two other makers, James Ashborn and William Tilton. We are fortunate to be able to compare Martin's business with Ashborn's, for one of Ashorn's account books, for the early 1850s, is extant and documents his highly mechanized factory in rural Connecticut. There he built instruments of one standard size and adapted their manufacture to the strict division of labor that marked the earliest phase of the industrial revolution. Ashborn also chose to market all his instruments to only two firms, large New York wholesalers who advertised his guitars as their own. Martin's other competitor, Tilton, patented several important innovations in guitar design and eventually sold his rights to them to other large music houses, which then had the instruments manufactured under their names. Unlike Ashborn, however, whose instruments rarely carried his name, Tilton insisted on having his prominently displayed on them, alongside the music house's stamp.

Martin's own records during this period show that he, like Ashborn, took steps to streamline work in his factory. He welcomed the greater publicity for his instruments that came through his agents' advertisements and the endorsements from prominent teachers and artists. But when some of the same kinds of large firms that had signed Ashborn and bought the rights to Tilton's patents approached him, Martin maintained his independence. Thus, although through the 1860s Ashborn produced many more guitars per annum than Martin (we have no records of Tilton's output), the unexcelled quality of Martin's guitars allowed him to maintain supremacy in the trade.

After the Civil War, Martin began to change his way of doing business. In particular, he moved more and more of his instruments through one wholesaler, C. A. Zoebisch & Sons, which worked with him in various ways to manipulate the market in favor of his instruments. By 1864 he and Zoebisch carried on an extensive correspondence regarding orders for guitars that Zoebisch & Sons had acquired in and beyond the city. Concomitantly, the extensive correspondence with other houses and clients around the country which had characterized Martin's business in the 1850s now greatly decreased. Instead, most inquiries and comments came via Zoebisch & Sons, which, while not claiming Martin's guitars as its own, clearly had become essential to Martin's success in the market.

In 1867 Martin implicitly acknowledged his advancing age through the formation of a partnership with his son (known as Frederick or Fritz) and his nephew, both of whom had long worked for him. From this point, he stamped his guitars "C. F. Martin and Co." rather than "C. F. Martin." This new arrangement, which required the two junior partners to invest in the firm, ensured the financial future of the company that Martin had labored to build over three decades. Daybooks and ledgers from this period indicate Frederick's growing involvement in and control over business decisions in the firm.

These accounts also record the first orders from Lyon & Healy, a Chicago-based music wholesaler that, in the 1870s, began to challenge other houses for preeminence in the American music trade. Martin's difficulties in supplying Lyon & Healy with the numbers of guitars it sought, and at the discount prices it wanted, caused much friction and eventually contributed to the Chicago firm's decision to manufacture its own instruments. By the 1880s Lyon & Healy had become one of the largest musical instrument makers in the nation. Even as C. F. Martin and Company struggled to meet this challenge, however, it rejected the large-scale factory production that eventually defined Lyon & Healy's operation. Instead, it continued to handcraft its guitars, even as it allowed Zoebisch & Sons to try every trick to keep Martin guitars, and its own firm, on top of the market.

For four decades C. F. Martin adapted to a constantly expanding and evolving market economy. Indeed, his career epitomizes the early history of manufacturing. He began his trade in Europe in a medieval guild system of handcraftsmanship based in the tutorial relationship of master and apprentice. Frustrated by the restrictions this placed on his enterprise, he immigrated to New York City, where he rightly gauged the new nation's obsession with music. He capitalized on his European connections and seized the opportunity to establish himself as a middleman in the transatlantic importation of goods. After he moved to Nazareth, he constructed a small steam-powered workshop and reorganized his labor force according to each worker's specific skills, both actions characteristic of the early industrial revolution. By the post-Civil War era he had confronted the challenge of competitors that produced goods in huge factories like Lyon & Healy's, where much of the labor was carried on by steam-powered machinery and which spent large sums of money on national advertising. He responded by consolidating his relationship with a major New York wholesaler that could better sell his goods in the new markets these upstarts had begun to serve.

To be sure, Martin's success in the early American music trade was unique. But his career is equally significant for its typicality. His is an inside narrative of American business during the decades when thousands of other nineteenth-century craftspeople, immigrant and native-born, similarly embraced the promise of American enterprise. And, like many of these entrepreneurs, Martin, too, succeeded financially through his cultivation of a new class of consumers who viewed the goods they acquired as markers of their social position. His story opens new windows on our view of nineteenth-century American business.
…
In many ways, this has been an unusual book to write. For one thing, it was a bit like trying to discuss Hamlet without the prince, for although the book has C. F. Martin at its center, we know very little about his personal life. Almost none of his own letters survive, and thus I have had to reconstruct large portions of his story through the correspondence of those who wrote to him. Further, very few of these letters concern personal matters but instead are devoted to the manufacture and marketing of guitars. Only a handful are from family members, and these missives do not provide enough information to give rich texture to Martin's biography. Ironically, however, we are compensated for this paucity of sources about Martin's personal life by the sheer depth of the archive for his career in the music trade. With the exception of the mysterious 1840s, documentation of Martin's business career, from his several activities in New York in the 1830s to his death in 1873, is unprecedented for the history of early American music.[1]

I first became aware of these materials after I had published an essay on James Ashborn's Wolcottville, Connecticut, guitar factory and had begun, with James F. Bollman, to write America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (1999). Perusing Jim Washburn and Richard Johnston's Martin Guitars (1997), I noticed a photograph and description of scores of the company's account books, dating back to Martin's immigration to New York. For Ashborn I had had only one such source—a single record book—yet had been able to reconstruct a detailed picture of his guitar-making business in the mid-1850s. The magnitude of the Martin archive stunned me. If each record book was as rich as the single one for Ashborn's business, I could, I believed, study and present the early American musical trade from an entirely new vantage point.

In the midst of the banjo project I wrote to C. F. Martin IV to indicate my interest and ask if I might have access to the archive. After a few letters back and forth, Chris Martin consented to let me look at the materials. I had intended to do so in the course of a family trip through Pennsylvania to New England in 1998 but was unable to fit the visit into my schedule. There things lay until the summer of 2000, when I renewed the overture and was put in contact with Dick Boak, director of artist relations at C. F. Martin & Company. Dick and I finalized plans, and in July my older son, David, and I drove to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where we stayed overnight before driving the last ten miles to Nazareth.

None of this work would have been possible without the generosity of Chris Martin, but in particular Dick Boak's full cooperation expedited my project. After giving us a Cook's tour of the entire Martin operation, an unforgettable experience, Dick brought us to a large, old-fashioned locked filing cabinet and a sturdy vault. Personal papers and photographs of family members were in this latter storage. And then, in the locked cabinet, there they were: scores of leather-bound record books of all sizes.

When I entered the company that day, I had wanted to make an inventory and assess the books' contents, to learn what was there and what period the records covered. Within minutes I was overwhelmed. There were no fewer than three account books and ledgers from the 1830s. There was a volume that described in detail every guitar made for several years in the 1850s, as well as other accounts for that decade. There were records with the Easton Bank in nearby Easton, Pennsylvania. There were several more ledgers for the period from the Civil War through Martin's death in 1873. And there were scores more record books, and even detailed inventories of equipment, into the early twentieth century, when Martin's son, and then his grandson, ran the firm. Although this material was not unknown—some it had been used by Mike Longworth, Walter Carter, and Jim Washburn and Richard Johnson, in different books they had done about the company—no professional historian had ever inventoried and systematically worked with it. The trove was beyond my wildest expectations.

I was so stunned that I did not know how to proceed. Properly to assess these materials would take months. Microfilming was one possibility, though costly. Photocopying on the Martin premises was an option but would still take much time and inconvenience the staff. Working at Nazareth from the originals was, for family reasons, impractical for me. I called Dick into the room where he had brought the materials and tried to give him a sense of their value to historians of nineteenth-century America. I then asked if he knew of any other materials in other parts of the factory. He spoke of boxes with hundreds of nineteenth-century letters in the attic of the "old" factory building on North Main Street! I talked with him about options for the proper organization and preservation of all these materials. And then I asked a question so preposterous that I still marvel at my presumption.

Could I take the account books, if I promised to deposit them in my home institution's rare books library immediately upon arrival and use them only therein? I didn't want an immediate answer. I wanted Dick to talk to Chris Martin, to explain the value of the materials to historians, the kind of history one could write from the archive, and how such work could be expedited if I had everyday access to the materials. We continued our family vacation, and as planned, the day before we headed south I called Dick. He gave me the go-ahead to keep them for a year.

The next day we drove virtually nonstop from Rockport, Massachusetts, to Nazareth to try to get to the factory before closing. We made it, but the individual who had recently installed new locks on the cabinet had mistakenly retained the keys and was not at work that day. Dick called him, and he drove in from his home several miles away, but with the wrong keys! Rather than send him back, Dick finally decided to call a maintenance worker to break open the lock. We sorted the books I wanted, those which covered the years of C. F. Martin Sr.'s life (for I had decided that he would be the focus of my project), packed them in one large box, placed them behind the front seat of the van, and started for North Carolina. Somewhere on Interstate 95 I realized that I had in my hands nothing less than the entire history of an American institution. I instructed my children to throw the box from the vehicle in case of any accident, but we fortunately arrived home after midnight without incident. At 8 a.m. the next morning I deposited all the materials in the rare books library, where eventually I photocopied or transcribed them. A year later, on another trip to New England, I brought these items home to Nazareth, relieved of a charge that had been both exhilarating in the work it made possible yet frightening in the responsibility it had placed on me as custodian of such a treasure.

And there still were all those boxes of letters and other ephemeral materials that lay unprotected in the attic of the "old" Martin building, on North Main Street. A century earlier someone had sorted them into bundles by year, each year tied with what had become old string, packets now suffused with the aroma of rosewood dust that had settled into them. Dick decided to send me one box of letters at a time by overnight express delivery. These bundles provided as many thrills as the account books. When one box arrived, I would open it carefully, like a child savoring a present, not knowing what it would hold. I unfolded hundreds of letters—many of which had not been read since C. F. Martin himself opened them—photocopied them, and returned the batch, eagerly to await another.

In addition to the rich correspondence from the 1850s with dealers and customers west to the Mississippi River and the immense run of letters from C. A. Zoebisch & Sons, I found hundreds of bills from the companies from which Martin ordered his supplies and raw materials, each piece of paper pierced in the middle as it was stuck down on the spike of an old-fashioned bill holder. Confronted with all these remarkable materials, as well as other family artifacts the company had graciously provided for my inspection, I began to fashion a narrative. This book is the result, the story of C. F. Martin, a life in the early American music trade.
…
In this work I have had the assistance of many individuals and institutions. As I have already indicated, the cooperation of C. F. Martin & Company was indispensable. The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) awarded me a Peterson Fellowship for this project, and the society's incomparable collections allowed me to fill in important gaps in my knowledge of early American music and nineteenth-century history generally. At this institution I would particularly like to thank Carolyn Sloat and Joanne Chaison, who expedited my work. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provided a research leave at a critical juncture, as well as funding for illustrations and travel through an endowed professorship. At the Library Company of Philadelphia my friend James Green was always quick to answer questions when I had them, and Dale Cockerell at Vanderbilt University was equally generous with his knowledge. Robert Fraker, dealer in rare books and aficionado of music, found rare items for me, including James Ballard's guitar tutor and Charles de Marescot's La Guitaromanie.

Laurence Libin, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has always been a strong supporter of my work. On this project he was an indispensable resource as I tried to piece together the intricacies of the transatlantic trade in musical instruments. Paul Wells, at the Center for Popular Music, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, graciously responded to my inquiries, as did the music historian Lloyd Farrar. Frank Ford generously allowed access to his photographs of early guitars. Tony Creamer, owner of the Fretted Instrument Workshop in Amherst, Massachusetts, made available some of his splendid instruments for illustrations, as did Stan Werbin at Elderly Instruments in Lansing, Michigan; Andrâ P. Larson, at America's Shrine to Music; Fred Oster, of Vintage Instruments in Philadelphia; and Cathy Chinery, the Chinery Collection. Bill LaPlante shared his great knowledge of the construction of Martin guitars and gave me a free hand to pick from his important collection of slides that illustrate the restoration work he has performed. Bailey Adams and Bill Capell, two enthusiastic collectors of early guitars, shared photographs and pointed out many important things to me. Greg French, John and Rosalie Jacobs, Keith Davis of the Hallmark Photographic Collection, and Grant Romer at the George Eastman House generously loaned rare and beautiful images from their collections for illustrations. Fred Stipe of Photographic Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill did yeoman's work in preparing the black-and-white photographs and some of the color. John and Cheryl Conron again graciously hosted my stay in Worcester when I was at AAS.

As always, I thank my wife, Leslie, and my children, David, Katherine, and Daniel, for their love, their understanding of how much time it takes to write a book, and their toleration of my idiosyncrasies. Finally, Jim Bollman, my coauthor on America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century, supported this project as enthusiastically as he did our earlier collaboration. Elsewhere in this book I have put on record my respect for his knowledge of and dedication to the world of early American stringed instruments, and my thanks for his years of friendship. I never would have begun writing about nineteenth-century music without him, for it was he who, in the early 1990s, sold me the guitar maker James Ashborn's remarkable financial record book and got me started in new endeavors.