BRATTLEBORO — Lee Chaney enjoyed a lifelong love of musical instruments, especially those with keyboards. Over the years he built a sizable and varied personal collection of instruments, and even established a modest museum in his home for others to view his collection.
A professor of educational psychology in Jacksonville, Ala., for more than 40 years, Chaney retired to Clinton, N.C., where he died on March 4, 2012.
Now his son, John Chaney, has decided that Brattleboro's Estey Organ Museum is the ideal home for many of these impressive, and historically important, instruments. In addition to several Estey reed organs, Lee Chaney's collection included instruments by builders who had a historical relationship with Estey, notably Riley Burdett of Putney, and others whose instruments also illustrate the development of the American reed organ.
The collection also contained framed posters about organ building, and other important archival memorabilia.
Estey Organ Museum Managing Director Philip Stimmel travelled to North Carolina and selected those items that most clearly illustrated the important role that Brattleboro played in the reed organ phenomenon in the United States of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Stimmel tells The Commons that Windham County was a dynamic hub of activity in the field, and included such well-known builders as Joseph Jones, Riley Burdett, Henry Kirk White, Edwin B. Carpenter, and Isaac Hines, each of whom was variously affiliated with Jacob Estey.
The Chaney collection also included an organ built by Ross, West, and Morse that was delivered to the Poultney Historical Society for its museum of melodeons built in that town.
Stimmel adds that perhaps the most important instrument returned to Brattleboro is an Estey Chapel Organ, Style H98.
The organ is significant not only owing to its large number of stops, but also because of its beautiful golden pipe top. Though these aren't needed in tone production, such pipe tops were much in demand as eye-catching adornments.
This organ will be on display at the lobby of Brattleboro Savings & Loan on Main Street for several weeks, and will be played there by local organists.
According to Stimmel, the manufacture of reed organs was a phenomenon that swept the United States from approximately 1835 to the 1950s. Hundreds of builders dotted the country and competed for customers.
Such organs were cheaper and lighter than pianos, didn't require tuning, and quickly became the instrument of choice for the well-appointed family parlor. The instruments' popularity waned as the middle class became more affluent, and pianos claimed their niche.