Organ Supply Industries - History

History

Organ Supply Industries has its origins in two organ builders whom Erie investors encouraged to move their operations to Erie in the late 19th century. They include the Burdett Reed Organ Company, of Chicago, a reed organ manufacturer whose operation was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871; and the A. B. Felgemaker Organ Company, originally of Buffalo, New York. The Tellers-Kent Organ Company, sprang from two Felgemaker employees in 1906.

A. B. Felgemaker sent Anton Gottfried and his colleague Henry Kugel from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Erie, where they set up shop in the Felgemaker plant. The A. Gottfried Organ Company relocated to its own Erie facilities in 1905. Gottfried and Kugel had earlier worked for the Haskell Company, a prominent organ manufacturer in Philadelphia. Fred Durst, of Hinners Organ Company of Pekin, Illinois, joined as superintendent of A. Gottfried Organ Company in 1917. Harry Auch and John Hallas, of the Haskell Company, came to Erie in 1920 to join Gottfried, Kugel, and Kugel's son Harry Kugel in the formation of a metal organ pipe manufacturer called National Organ Supply. Durst and Henry Kugel's sons Harry and Ruben Kugel formed Organ Supply Corporation in 1924. The pipe manufacturing company was purchased by Organ Supply Corporation in 1958. Fred Gluck purchased the Organ Supply Corporation in the early 1970s and merged it with Durst and Company to form Durst Organ Supply Company, Incorporated. The name was changed to Organ Supply Industries, Incorporated in 1978.

Read more about this topic:  Organ Supply Industries

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
    Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

    There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)

    The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)