Jacob Estey was the son of Isaac Estey and Patty Forbes.
His father, offspring of an English family which had settled in Sutton, Massachusetts, early in the nineteenth century removed to Hinsdale, New Hampshire, United States, where Jacob was born.
Frequent beatings and chores so surfeited him that, deaf to the call of the soil, he ran off at the age of thirteen, made his way to Worcester, Massachusetts, and managed to secure a common-school education and two years of study at an academy while learning the plumbing trade.
He had accumulated money, but soon lost it all as a contractor for public roads.
As a result, at the age of four, Jacob was adopted by a neighbor farmer named Shattuck.
He invested his savings in a small melodeon-manufacturing shop in Brattleboro.
Thenceforward his story is one of the gradual development of a great American industry through Yankee grit and intelligence.
Jacob Estey hawked his instruments in person, driving his pedler’s wagon loaded with melodeons across the country to New York, as well as through the New England states and over the boundary into Canada.
With him went a boy who could play the hymn- tunes whose simple harmonies sold his wares.
Since currency was scarce in the country districts through which he passed, he took his payment in kind—cheese, butter, farm produce, cattle, and, in Canada especially, horses.
Undaunted by the burning of his little shop in 1857, he secured capital, took in Levi Knight Fuller as a partner, and resumed melodcon building the following year.
In 1852 the shop employed six workmen and its total value was estimated at $2, 700; before the end of the century the firm’s output was 1, 800 organs a month, and Estey “Cottage Organs” were exported to every part of the globe.
In his own special field he is credited With the invention of the Vox hmnana tremolo stop on the reed-organ, though it seems probable this was an adaptation rather than an invention.
More plausible is the contention that he was one of the first to employ the “easy payment” plan to further the sale of his organs.
Jacob Estey, influenced, perhaps, by his own hard struggles in early life, was a kindly, sympathetic employer.
In 1834 he walked (to save coach-hire) from Worcester to Brattleboro, Vermont, where he established himself as a plumber and, in 1837, married Desdemona Wood, a farmer’s daughter.
