Only Orvilles in the Building

The photo on the right is of Orville’s studio when it was on the 2nd floor of 104 East Main Street. Most everyone refers to it as the workbench photo. It was taken by professional photographer Henry Dornbush in 1900 as notated in the lower left hand corner. Orville occupied this space from the summer of 1897 until he moved everything to the newly rented Gibson factory on Exchange Place in 1902.

I’ve been on the 2nd floor of some of the old 19th century buildings in downtown Kalamazoo. Some floors were configured as living spaces and some as business spaces. Considering there was a tailor shop behind Orville’s studio and a dentist office behind the tailor shop, I’m thinking business configuration.

The second building from the corner is 104 East Main. Parson”s Business School was the previous occupant. An indication of where Orville was on the 2nd floor comes from the 1896 Kalamazoo Sanborn map. Sanborn maps were used by the fire department. They needed to know things like which parts of any given building were wood or brick. And what iron elements were involved such as doors, built-in safes or ovens. They needed to know where the windows were, if they in fact opened and whether they had removable or fixed shutters.

If you look at the existing Sanborn map from 1896, it shows that only the first floor of 104 East Main had windows at the rear of the building. The second and third floors did not. This means that Orville’s studio had to have been at the front, facing the street, with those four huge windows that opened. There’s no way he could have used as much glue and varnish as instruments required in a room with no ventilation.

The workbench photo also gives a slight indication of light coming through a window to the left. There would have been a long wall to Henry’s back. Off to his right was an entryway leading to a smaller room, about two thirds the size of this front room. The smaller room would have had a door at the far side, opening out into the main hallway with stairs leading down to the ground floor and out onto Main Street.

.

Using the four huge windows across the front for ventilation, how could Orville open them without bugs, birds, squirrels, leaves and dust from the gravel and dirt streets coming in and settling on his work? One way would have been for him to use removable wire mesh screens which could be had, framed or unframed, at most hardware or department stores. Since there were no standard sizes, Orville would have been able make a frame to fit the particular width of those enormous windows. As for the dust, I can only imagine he made good use of the days when the street sprayer was out with his water wagon.

Michigan winters are another story. With temperatures in Dec/Jan/Feb hovering in the teens and twenties, heating was inconsistent within these brick and wood buildings. The cold wind still blows down these streets like the tundra. In Orville’s day, some of the much older buildings had huge fireplaces for heat at the end of the hall on each floor. Then there were parlor stoves, built right here in town, to put out additional heat to any individual room.

By the time Orville occupied this space, steam boilers and radiators were in use as shown by the vertical stacks indicated on the Sanborn map. He could have bought and stacked wood to his hearts desire without having to worry about stray embers from the parlor stove burning his place to the ground. Like the wood moulding he got out of the Dewing Building (his previous studio at 114 South Burdick Street) to make Henry Dornbush’s mandolin in 1901.

The view out the front windows of 104 East Main hasn’t changed all that much from Orville’s time. The line of businesses across the street was known as saloon row. Starting from the left with 103 E. Main was the Metropolitan Saloon, 105 was the Charles H, Pickard saloon. Orville sold his original shares in the Gibson company to Mr. Pickard. In the Baumann Block at 107 E. Main was the Eugene Scott saloon, 109 in the old Lilienfeld building, with the eyebrow cornice in the roof line that’s still there, was the M. J. O’Neill saloon, 111 was the Cowie & Russell saloon, the saloon at 113 has an unknown owner at this time and 115 was the McNamara saloon.

.

.

Orville’s side of the street, on the other hand, has been completely torn down and rebuilt. Notice that in the directory, Witwer’s Bakery was at 114 East Main in the middle of the block on Orville’s side of the street. The soon-to-be Gibson factory will be located in the buildings behind this bakery on Exchange Place. Farther on down the block was 118 East Main, the home of the Arthur P. Sprague shoe store, Orville’s employer for over eleven years. Dan Cohn, a tailor and buddy of Orville’s, had his last business in the Sprague shop before he moved to Rochester, New York in 1898.

.

.

.

Henry Dornbush’s photography studio is at the end of the block at 120 East Main. Speaking of Henry Dornbush, in Julius Bellson’s first draft (not the later draft with company information added) of “The Story of Gibson,” he implies that Orville and Henry were school mates or peers. Orville was in fact 23 years older than Henry. Please take note here, it’s not my intention to point out everyone’s mistakes, only to set the record straight. It’s not the person that I’m correcting, it’s the information.

In 1900, when the workbench photo was taken, Henry G. Dornbush was 21 years old and was the youngest photographer in Kalamazoo ever to have his own studio. He engaged in a new trend of taking photos of people in their home environment as opposed to a studio full of props. Too bad Orville isn’t in this one. I wonder if Henry took more than one photo.

By the time this photo was taken, Orville’s vaudeville days were behind him. All his stage and band buddies had either struck out on the road or moved away or gotten married and had families. Ed Parke, who Orville had known since 1875 and was the long time desk clerk at the Burdick House Hotel, a favorite hang-out for all the vaudeville actors and musicians in town, is about to be found dead from suicide in his hotel room.

With a design patent under his belt, maybe Orville thought, this is an indication of the direction in which he should go. Maybe he would think more and more about getting in touch with those guys that were interested in mass producing his creations. Maybe, at the age of forty-six, it was time to let someone else do all the paperwork and keep the books. Maybe it was time to let someone else pound the pavement for sales. Maybe, Orville thought, the idea of spending all his time doing what he loved most, that is building instruments, sounded pretty damn appealing to him.