bugle’.(b New Boston, NH, 2 July 1794; d Wells River, VT, 18 Nov 1878). American maker of brass and woodwind instruments. He began making woodwind instruments in West Fairlee, Vermont, in the early 1820s. In 1827 he and three partners opened a large shop in Winchester, New Hampshire, as Graves & Alexander. By 1830 the shop occupied the upper two floors of a four-storey building constructed jointly with a clothier, Nathaniel Herrick. The firm, the first large-scale manufacturer of wind instruments in the USA, turned out large quantities of flutes, clarinets, fifes and flageolets using water-powered machinery. From 1832 the company was known as Graves & Co..
James
Keat (1813–45), the third son of the London instrument maker Samuel Keat, went
to Winchester about 1837. He evidently introduced brass instrument making to
Graves & Co., for a number of keyed bugles and one Stölzel valve cornet
have been found in the USA signed ‘J. Keat for Graves & Co.’. From that
time on and throughout the 1840s Graves & Co. produced both brass and
woodwind instruments. By 1842 they had obtained another floor in the building
and their products included keyed bugles, ophicleides and several sizes of
brass instruments with Vienna double-piston valves. Graves called the larger of
these ‘trombacellos’. The 1844 exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable
Mechanic Association in Boston included the following Graves instruments: ‘one
trombacello, one tenor valve trombone, one valve trumpet, two valve post horns
and one E bugle’.
Graves & Co. rebuilt their premises in 1848 after a fire, but the business did not recover. In 1851 the shop was sold and Graves moved to Boston. He and two of his sons continued the business there until the 1870s making brass instruments but no woodwind.
Samuel
Graves, with the help of James Keat, was one of the earliest makers of valved
brass instruments in the USA. He was well known for his fine E and B keyed bugles, which his company produced in
large quantities. His one- to eight-key flutes and five- to thirteen-key
clarinets were also well made and popular. The water-powered factory at
Winchester was the largest producer of woodwind and brass instruments in the
USA for many years. Numerous examples of Graves instruments are found in the
John H. Elrod Memorial Collection, Germantown, Maryland; the Henry Ford Museum,
Dearborn, Michigan; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Shrine to Music
Museum, University of South Dakota.
Waterhouse-LangwillI
R.E. Eliason: Keyed Bugles in the United States (Washington DC, 1972), 16–19
R.E. Eliason: Samuel Graves, New England Musical Instrument Maker (Dearborn, MI, 1974)
R.E. Eliason: ‘Letters to Marsh & Chase from Graves & Company, Musical Instrument Makers’, JAMIS, iv (1978), 43–53
R.T. Dudgeon: The Keyed Bugle (Metuchen, NJ, 1993), 64–5
ROBERT E. ELIASON