The company enjoyed a brief renaissance as one of the largest manufacturers of pianos and organs in the world throughout the 1960s and 70s – an era that also saw the creation of the Imperial Bösendorfer, a grand piano with an impressive girth of 9 feet, 6 inches – with numbers reaching into nearly 100,000 units produced each year. In 1961, with the release of its first electric organ, the Kimball subsidiary of Jasper became known officially as the Kimball Piano and Organ Company and then as Kimball International, that latter of which also saw the company’s headquarters move to Jasper, Indiana and its piano manufacture move to West Baden, Indiana.
In the mid 1950s, following difficulties that had arisen from the burdens of the Second World War and the Great Depression, the company began slipping into a financial crisis, which signaled the beginning of its slow decline and its subsequent purchase by the Jasper Corporation furniture manufacturers in 1959. Until the 1950s, Kimball enjoyed success as one of the world’s largest and most distinguished manufacturers of pianos, specializing in low-cost vertical pianos built for the middle class. In addition to Kimball, the company also produced mid-grade pianos under the names Dunbar, Harrison, Hinze, and Whitney. When production of pipe organs ceased in 1942 – after having completed over 7,000 units – the company turned its focus solely to piano manufacture, obtaining a new factory in 1955 at 26th Street and California Boulevard in Chicago, and subsuming the revered Bösendorfer Piano Company of Austria in 1966. The company ceased production of reed organs in 1922, having produced in excess of 400,000 units. Kimball also began expanding its piano manufacturing, building a new factory dedicated solely to the instrument and hiring technicians and builders from Steinway & Sons and Bechstein.
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On account of declining sales in reed organs that began in 1890 and steadily increased into the twentieth century, the company expanded its production at the turn of the century to include large-scale pipe organs, a series of theatre organs, player pianos, and phonographs. The Kimball Organ Company was officially incorporated in 1882 and by 1888 the company had begun producing pianos, with production steadily increasing by 1889 to fifty pianos per week and fifty reed organs in a single day.
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Earhuff Company, and was soon in full production, with a chain of satellite stores opening throughout the Midwest and a head office at what came to be known as Kimball Hall in Chicago.
In 1879, Kimball began constructing his first reed organs with an action produced by the J.G. In later years, the company obtained a factory in Melrose Park, Illinois. It was then moved to the Crosby Opera House on Washington Street, which was later destroyed by the Chicago Fire in 1871. The company was first located on Chicago’s Lake Street, but soon moved to a location at 99 South Clark Street, where it operated from 1858 to 1860. Lighte, Emerson Piano Company, and Chickering & Sons – and reed organs.
In 1857, Kimball liquidated his investments and relocated to Chicago, Illinois, where he established the first iteration of his company as a small dealership that sold pianos – mostly squares, including those made by Hallet & Davis, F.C. While in his twenties, Kimball relocated to Decorah, Iowa, where he worked as a real estate agent and amassed a small fortune. Biography The Kimball Organ Company was established by William Wallace Kimball, an American reed and pipe organ manufacturer born in Rumford, Maine in 1828.
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