Cunningham Piano Company
Cunningham Piano Company began manufacturing acoustic upright and grand pianos in 1891. The founder, Patrick J. Cunningham, had recently emigrated from Ireland. He was a well trained craftsman and woodworker. Within their first decade of manufacturing, Cunningham Piano Company had gained recognition and had become a popular piano making company company in Philadelphia.
During the 1920s, the heyday of the pneumatic player piano, Cunningham Piano Company was the largest manufacturer of player pianos in Philadelphia and shipped their wares to the entire East Coast of the United States.
Noted musicians use the instruments, including Vincent Persichetti, a native Philadelphian and noted composer and professor at the Juilliard School, and George Gershwin who used a Cunningham Piano to write his opera "Porgy and Bess" in Folly Beach, South Carolina.
The Great Depression was a huge detriment to the businesses. Before the start of World War II, Cunningham Piano Company ceased production and their staff focused on helping the war effort.
After World War II
After the Second World War, Louis Cohen, a young piano technician who had worked for Patrick J. Cunningham, took over and changed the face of Cunningham Piano Company. Cohen determined that building a small number of pianos by hand without the national recognition of companies like Mason & Hamlin, Steinway, or Baldwin was difficult in the economic climate of the post World War II era. He went about gathering talent from those manufacturers and other areas of piano technology to set up a restoration facility. He chose Germantown, Philadelphia as the new location.