A city that built instruments: the Fort Wayne Organ Company and Packard pianos

1871 — 1930

Music as manufacture: Fort Wayne's largest nineteenth-century music institution was a factory. Isaac T. Packard was a Chicago organ builder whose business was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871; local tradition holds that he boarded a train east and got off where his fare ran out — Fort Wayne. With backing from prominent local investors including Charles McCulloch, Stephen B. Bond, and Judge Lindley Ninde, the Fort Wayne Organ Company was incorporated on November 20, 1871. Ground was broken in December for a four-story brick plant on Fairfield Avenue, and the first Packard reed organ was completed on April 24, 1872. Packard died in September 1873; under Stephen Bond and later his son Albert, the company flourished, building the ornate "Packard Orchestral" reed organs that filled American parlors. The firm took up pianos in 1893–94 (its first piano catalogue appeared in 1895), changed its name to The Packard Company in 1899 and to The Packard Piano Company in 1915, added a player piano in 1908, and made its last organ in 1914; during the First World War the plant turned to aircraft propellers for the U.S. Air Service. The same year the factory opened, the city also chartered formal music teaching: the Fort Wayne Conservatory of Music was incorporated in 1871, with L. M. Ninde as president. The piano company hit its high note in the 1920s, but the Depression ended it — the last piano rolled out on February 6, 1930, the day the company went into receivership (a successor corporation bought the assets in the fall of 1932, and the Packard name survived under Story & Clark into mid-century, but the Fort Wayne factory era was over). The plant was demolished in the early 1930s; the city acquired the site in 1937 and made it Packard Park, where a historical marker dedicated in 2019 commemorates the company. Its workers' neighborhood grew up around the plant and anchored South Wayne.

Sources:

1. The Fort Wayne Organ Company Chronology, The Packard Legacy (packardorgan.com), drawn from Charles Robison, The Fort Wayne Organ Company & the Packard Legacy, vols. 1–2 (2020–21) — incorporation November 20, 1871; first organ April 24, 1872; piano catalogue 1895; name changes 1899 and 1915; receivership February 6, 1930; 1932 asset purchase.
2. The History Center, Notes & Queries, "Packard Pianos," by Carmen Doyle (2013) — Packard's Chicago Fire story, the company as a South Wayne employer, the 1893 turn to pianos.
3. The History Center, object record 89.20.1 (Packard Bond player piano, 1920) — the WWI propeller conversion, the Bond and Elsinger trade names, the 1930 closing, the 1937 park, the Story & Clark trademark sale; gives the Packard Piano Company name as "about 1907," against the chronology's documented 1915.
4. Kevin Leininger, "Playing Our Song," News-Sentinel, November 21, 1981 (Allen County Public Library file) — the train-fare tradition stated as legend, the 1899 name change, the last piano on February 6, 1930.
5. Fort Wayne city directory, 1878 (R. L. Polk & Co.) — the Fort Wayne Conservatory of Music, incorporated 1871, and the Fort Wayne Organ Co. listing.