![]() ![]() These were mostly small-bodied parlor guitars which were popular at the time. Fortunately for Harmony, sometime around 1897, Sears began offering Harmony Guitars in its catalogue during this period, with prices starting at a whopping, $5.75. Sears soon also began offering guitars in their catalogues and by 1900, Sears would overtake Montgomery Ward as the world’s largest retailer. Perhaps this was the kernel of what would grow into a huge legend around the quality and reliability of American guitars the world over.Īnother big player in the mail-order game was Sears – another midwestern based shopping catalogue that had traditionally been used to sell watches and jewellery. ![]() Imported guitars, said Montgomery Ward, would crack or split due to climate changes, while American guitars would not. In its 1894 catalogue, MW pledged to sell only American-made guitars because, the catalogue claimed, American-made guitars were a superior product. One such mail-order business was Montgomery Ward – in fact it was the world’s largest retailer at the time. Crucially, the city was also the home of the newfangled mail-order merchandise business – an innovation which would transform the way we shopped and general consumer culture across the world, but which also played a major role in the dissemination of the guitars across America and the rise of the guitar makers there. As such, Chicago was also home to instrument brands like Silvertone, Kay, Valco, Supro, Regal, National, and several others. Chicago seemed to be at the centre of America’s industrial boom in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Chicago was a central hub for all sorts of manufacturing due to its location on the Great Lakes shipping lanes as well as being a central railroad hub. Harmony and its early main competitor, Oscar Schmidt of New Jersey, continued to favour use of the 10th fret long after most other major manufacturers settled on the ninth fret.īy 1894, there were about 40 employees working at Harmony. ![]() The role of the guitar back in the 1890s was to be used primarily for vocal accompaniment or to add harmonies to the mandolin and banjo orchestral parts of the time – perhaps this is where the name “Harmony” came from. Mandolins still typically have position markers at the 10th fret and the guitars were meant to be an easy transition for mandolin players. Harmony was not the first to do this, as it was a somewhat common strategy employed by guitar makers who intended to sell their instruments to musicians in mandolin orchestras, which were immensely popular at the time. One peculiar spec we do know about was the way the guitars approached fret-markers – the guitars had three dots at the fifth, seventh, and 10th frets (rather than the 9th). Very little information is known about the earliest Harmony-made guitars as it seems that not too many survived, but from what we do know, the earliest models were small acoustics with gut strings, and glued-on bridges. ![]()
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