BRATTLEBORO-MaryJane Renaud Giroux remembers the day in 1961 when her father, Hyacinth Renaud, came home from work with some news.
"I bought the Estey buildings," he told her mother, Louise.
"With what?" she replied.
Giroux recalls the story, laughing at it as her father would have. More than 60 years after that conversation, vestiges of the Estey Organ Company are front and center in her home, which is decorated with several framed blueprints of the instruments, including a sketch of number 798, a "huge, beautiful pipe organ" designed for a church in Harris, Texas.
She also has several blueprints that were rendered on linen, from thousands more that her family found in the Estey buildings. There were so many, in fact, that her mother took some, bleached them, and used them as dish towels.
Anything could have happened to the vacant Estey buildings - including the wrecking ball, as befell so much infrastructure of the 19th century in the era of urban renewal.
But it's still here, in large part because of Hyacinth Renaud, an entrepreneur who needed more space in his home for his burgeoning family and who found a calling to preserve a huge part of local history before it could fade into memory.
A manufacturing town
The Estey Organ Company complex stands as a monument to the industrial revolution in Brattleboro and as an example of adaptive reuse. Most recently, planners and lawmakers, including U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, have been exploring the potential for creating housing in two of the buildings that remain.
The Birge Street buildings were the third home of the company, which operated there until 1960 and in its heyday employed more than 600 workers.
The business began around 1850 at the foot of Canal Street near the Main Street Bridge. After the building burned, it moved across the street on the site of what is now the Brattleboro Food Co-op. That building, in turn, lost most of its lumber stock during a flood.
At that point, the Estey family purchased 60 acres and erected what historian Harold Barry described as "the sprawling organ works" in eight large buildings on Birge Street, "each three stories high and a hundred feet long."
Originally, the site also included "a storehouse, an engine house, a wood-drying house, a blacksmith shop and a firehouse," Barry wrote.
As business dried up in the early 1950s, the buildings went up for sale. Renaud, a lover of all things old, had hoped to buy them.
George D. Mason, the president of Dunham Bros. shoe manufacturing company, got there first, purchasing the eight buildings for $30,000 in 1961.
But, Mason made Renaud a promise: He would sell them back in one year to him for $40,000. Renaud gave him a $300 deposit on that promise.
Giroux remembers how it went: "My father went to the bank and got a 90-day note. Then he found other people who might like to obtain one of the buildings."
He sold two of the buildings to Charles and Robert Bolster, another to Alfred and Martha Root, a third to Franklin N. Dessaint, and a fourth to Donald W. Record and Thomas P. Jackson, who launched a trailer manufacturing firm.
"My dad kept the remainder of the buildings for himself. He was able to pay off the loan in time," says Giroux simply.
Why would anyone need two factory buildings?
Giroux laughs as she explains that before her father bought the Estey buildings, he had tried to buy another large home, given the size of the family: she is one of 16 children born between 1944 and 1968.
"The family was getting bigger and bigger, and the space was getting smaller and smaller," she says. "At that point, he had already renovated the attic for the eight girls in the family, where we slept on four double beds."
She says her father thought he found a solution in "one of those large old houses" on Putney Road.
"But when the woman selling it found out that 16 children were going to live in it, she refused to sell it to him," Giroux says.
"He needed a workshop of his own for his business that was out of the house," she says.
A kind man
In a 1972 profile in the Brattleboro Reformer, writer Virginia Page describes Hyacinth Renaud as a "modest, almost shy man, who has never advertised his business or his pleasure: antique collecting, trading, and even manufacturing."
Page also noted that Renaud "undoubtedly sports the most magnificent mustache in Windham County."
The mustache was a classic handlebar, which he twirled sometimes as he spoke; a smile and playful eyes completed the picture. Hyacinth Renaud was always known as a kind man.
Renaud, a devout Catholic, explained to his profiler how he was able to provide for his large family without incurring much debt by using anything that was available to him.
In 1949, "with the Lord's help," Renaud wanted to build a shop and a home, but was refused for a bank loan, as he had no collateral.
But his mother had given him a piece of land on Fairground Road.
"I ordered material and hired some carpenters, but I told them that I couldn't pay them for a couple of weeks," Renaud told Page. "In two weeks, I had something started, so I went back to the bank and told them I had collateral."
The bank lent him $5,000 - the first of several loans - and he completed the house and shop.
"I worked night and day, and the shop grew," he told the Reformer.
Antiques and horse trading
When Hyacinth and Louise Renaud were married in 1943, they began a small business. Hyacinth bought used chairs at auction and refurbished them. Louise borrowed a book from Brooks Memorial Library about how to cane chairs, and they made a simple living very quickly, each of them working a part of the project.
Giroux remembers that her father did "a lot of turnings," and later, he began to repair antiques. He took whatever work he could get, including turning hardwood squares on a lathe and spinning the wood into Windsor legs for chairs and stools. He would then deliver these to a dealer in Massachusetts.
Renaud's brother Romeo worked with him for many years. "He had a couple of employees. He couldn't pay them very much, but they were happy to work for whatever he paid them," his daughter says.
In the Reformer profile, Renaud says his experience buying and selling antiques "put me in contact with a lot of knowledge about furniture and how to make nice things."
Eventually, Renaud also began to use very old wood and would copy some of the antiques he repaired such that they were so finely made, he sold them to a Manhattan dealer.
He knew a lot about antiques and frequented auctions.
Giroux remembers with pride, "My father could go to an auction, buy an item, take a walk around the barn, and find someone to buy that item and make 10 times his money back."
Renaud worked for Estey Organs in 1945 but lost his job when he asked for a raise.
At that point, even though he was upset about losing his job, he realized that "he found more market for his talents as a cabinetmaker," as his March 1979 obituary put it.
It also didn't stop him from collecting Estey memorabilia. The third floor of the Number 5 building, which he used for his workshop, could be accessed only by an old freight elevator. Over the course of many years, Renaud acquired nearly every Estey organ he could find, regardless of its condition, and stored them there, along with a massive collection of antiques.
Renaud "anticipated the nostalgia that would eventually surround the old products of the company, most of which were handcrafted," according to Page's profile.
According to his daughter, Renaud was "instrumental in helping begin the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center," lending the museum parts of his extensive personal collection of Estey organs. Upon his death, Louise Renaud gave the entire display to the museum permanently.
Giroux says her father had hoped to convert one of the Birge Street buildings into a museum of Estey memorabilia.
Creativity and survival
Buying a defunct manufacturing complex solved the problem of giving the Renaud family enough space for home and for work. Putting food on the table was a persistent challenge - and Hyacinth Renaud used his same creative negotiation talents to keep the family satiated.
"We never took handouts or welfare," says Giroux, even though "we ate amazing amounts of food." The family kept a little grocery store in the basement of the house for storage.
"Dad often went to auction and bought lots of food. The grocery bill was huge. When the grocery store where the laundromat is now on Canal Street burned down, my father bought the contents," she remembered.
Virginia Page wrote, "Renaud had fed his family through the same business methods that he has managed his shop. He has traded a repair job for bushels of potatoes, and he swapped one of the Birge Street Buildings for the contents of a grocery store.
"We don't smoke, and I once sold all of the cigarette cartons for more than I had paid for the entire store," Renaud told the Reformer.
Louise Renaud did a lot of baking and made all the sack lunches for her children every school day.
"We went to St. Michael's School, and they didn't have a hot lunch program. My mother would pack our lunches. We weren't allowed to look inside each bag; we were just supposed to grab one on our way out the door," Giroux says.
"A typical lunch was a sandwich, fruits, and a dessert. I always looked forward to Fridays because it was almost always tuna fish on Fridays. Other days it might be a sardine sandwich or a cold bean sandwich or peanut butter and jelly," she said, noting that sardines were not her favorite.
But there was no free lunch in the Renaud household. Everyone pitched in.
"We helped collect the shavings from the wood shop. My father gave them to a local farmer for bedding and once or twice a year the farmer would return the favor with a slaughtered cow," says Giroux.
"Every day we came home from school, got out of our school clothes, and we'd stack wood or run the sander, or the table saw or the drill press," she recalls.
"Occasionally my father would see a high school kid going by and he'd give them a little money to help us load wood into the house to the shop. We kids were thinking, 'Hey, wait a minute, where's our money?'" she says, laughing.
Renaud once bought a funeral warehouse and brought all the caskets home. His wife made curtains for them out of fabric, and those were sold from his workshop at the Estey buildings as well.
He always had a soft spot for his family and made them furniture as well.
"He built a big table for our family meals; my brother Francis has that now," Giroux says. "My mother always wanted [to have] matching chairs, but we never did. Then one year he made her chairs that matched. It took him over a year to do that as a surprise for her."
Renaud "also made a solid, handmade, seven-drawer cherry dresser for me when I got married," Giroux continues. "He made furniture for all my siblings as well, and two beautiful cherry four-poster beds."
Noting that she also has in her possession "several other pieces" of furniture that her father created, Giroux says, "He's all around me. I miss him more as I get older."
An untimely loss
As a child, Renaud suffered from rheumatic fever and then again in adulthood, leaving him with a bad heart that kept him from serving during World War II and, despite a valve replacement, caused his death at age 58 in 1979.
"He had surgery at Dartmouth to replace a heart valve in an age when that was still very new, and I remember them coming for him with an ambulance," Giroux says.
"The whole family was standing outside, and I remember him being taken away on a stretcher and put into a medical van. He stayed in the hospital for quite a while," she adds.
After her husband died, Louise Renaud lost her only source of income. A family member who knew antiques began selling the items from the third floor of the building to provide her with a small income.
"The building was packed," Giroux said, "and piece by piece many of the items were sold. He had a lot of tools [and] antiques - he collected so many different things."
The youngest member of the family was 12 when Renaud died. Brothers Michael, David, and Jerry took over their father's woodworking business, and their mother deeded the building to them.
At that time, the brothers sold the organs and other Estey-related material to Ned Phoenix, a musician and reed organ specialist who would later be the founder of the Estey Organ Museum.
In 1991, Building 5 was damaged by fire. The three brothers salvaged what they could and sold the smaller pieces of woodworking items - and the building.
Louise Renaud's son-in-law helped her to turn the large family home into smaller units that she could rent out. She rented one of the units at a reduced rent and assisted an immigrant family with their housing.
A lasting impact
The work ethic demonstrated by their parents helped each of the 16 children to success in their adult lives.
"We all learned how to sew once we were old enough to reach the treadle on the sewing machine," says Giroux. "And all of us are very handy with crafts, skills we've each passed on to our own children." At least four of the siblings have used those skills professionally.
Abiding by her deep faith, and her need to always care for her children, even though Louise Renaud lost her husband of 36 years and lived well into her 90s, she was able to present a gift to the children who were still young and at home at the time their father died.
"She received Social Security benefits for the younger kids," Giroux says reverentially.
But her mother didn't spend that money.
"Instead, she saved it for them until they were adults," Giroux says.
Hyacinth Renaud's family lives on, in not only his children and 36 grandchildren, but in his great- and great-great-grandchildren, who number more than 100.
And his kindness lives on as well.
"When we were children, our parents believed that education was important," Giroux says.
And it wasn't just academics.
"If you got an A in English, but you received a D in conduct, that just wouldn't fly," Giroux says.
"My parents taught us to work hard, to look out for others, and to always be kind," she says. "The most important thing to them was how you behaved and carried yourself through the world."
This News item by Fran Lynggaard Hansen was written for The Commons.