Lincoln in PA

[bdornfeld]

Laura Keene's piano is in Kansas City, KS and did not perish in fire. It has been in the Jack Wyatt Museum of the Piano Technicians Guild Foundation for about ten years. Our website is quite new, and not what we would like it to be, but you can see the piano at http://www.ptgf.org/page/8/ All of the other pianos in our collection are historical in terms of the development of the piano and for their interest to piano technicians. The history of Laura Keene's piano as I understand it is as follows. Laura was known to travel with her piano as she traveled from town to town for her career acting and managing. The piano was brought to Ford's Theatre earlier on the day of Lincoln's assassination for the musical presentation of Honor to Our Soldiers. After the assassination, it is unclear when the piano was moved from the theatre. It is known that it was locked up with everything else as evidence in the crime scene. When Laura and her fellow travelers rode the train to Cincinnati, they had gotten their luggage from the theatre and possibly the piano too. It eventually went to her home; both of her daughters were musicians and played the piano, although it is said that Laura never touched her Chickering piano again. Please see the newspaper article from The Royal Centre Record of May 12, 1966: http://rcr.stparchive.com/Archive/RCR/RC...966P08.php This shows that the piano was donated by the heirs of Laura Keen to the Chickering Company "several years ago", presumably in the early 1960s. Chickering was at the time part of one of the largest piano makers in the world, the Aeolian Corporation, who also made Mason & Hamlin, Knabe and about fifty other brands of pianos. Their headquarters and main factory were in East Rochester, New York. When they closed the Rochester factory in 1982, the Keene Chickering piano was given to the Rochester Museum, quite possibly as an afterthought. When the factory was closed, everything was deserted for scavengers and scrap. This included log books from various factories and plans for building their wonderful pianos. Paul Monachino was a factory foreman there and saved many historical items that had been deserted. He helped get the piano into the Rochester Museum and when it did not fit their mission, he got it sent to us in Kansas City. Among the many mysteries are why E.F. Brooks, wrote that “whether it was or not (the piano belonging to Laura Keene) … no one could attest.” or “This piano was destroyed by fire.” There isn't much sense I can make of this, but have a few thoughts. In the early 1970s, the piano business was very bad. Kids were buying guitars and quitting the piano. Many piano builders went out of business around this time. I think Mr. Brooks may have been too busy to look into the questions posed to him. It is known that they had the piano around ten years earlier and historians were satisfied that it was the Keene Chickering. There is no record of any fires in any of the Aeolian properties in this period. He could have mistaken the piano for a similar Chickering upright piano that was destroyed by fire in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI on August 9, 1970. Not only could the "Ford" name cause some confusion, but the Ford Museum also had and still has the rocking chair that Lincoln sat in on that fatal night. Nobody knows why Mr. Brooks would have written what he did, but the piano could easily have been under a tarp or in a crate in a building he walked through everyday and he may not have known about it. I am a full time piano tuner/technician and also serving as president of the Piano Technicians Guild Foundation. I hope this information is interesting and helpful. Bruce Dornfeld