[p. 5] At a later date organ pipes and bellows were added to the piano and placed in the body of the instrument under the strings.
There at last, after one hundred and forty years, is the piano of Princess Amelia which was in
Medford in the closing year of the eighteenth and three opening years of the nineteenth centuries.
Could it but talk, what a story it might tell of its first home, the royal palace of
England.
It might also tell that in the very year of its making, King George was reluctantly acknowledging the independence of his rebellious subjects overseas, some of them on old High street in
Medford.
It might tell how the royal chaplain's daughter joined the erstwhile rebels, becoming an American citizen by her marriage; and of its journey across the
Atlantic with her. We may not know of her fortunes, or how the piano came to be sold.
John Montgomery was a Scotch-Irish farmer and leading citizen of that new town in the north county of Cowass, or Coos, called from the
Massachusetts town on the
Merrimack,
Haverhill, and probably its wealthiest man. George III had fifteen children,
Montgomery had thirteen, but it was his eldest, instead of the king's youngest, who was to be at last the mistress of the
London piano.
That she was such, after her school days at
Medford and
Newton and in her early married life, is shown by its northern journey to
Haverhill and its southern to New Ipswich.
No wonder that, with its use in school and family, and its various cartings about, it needed ‘tuning and repair’ in 1817, when it fell into the hands of
Jonas Chickering.
Referring to the history of New Ipswich we find of him—
When about nineteen years of age, a piano-forte, (the only one in town) became useless for want of some person to tune it and make some slight repairs; and although it was the first instrument of the kind he had ever seen, yet, prompted by curiosity and his interest in musical instruments he undertook the task and after much labor succeeded in restoring it to usefulness.
This apparently trifling matter, no doubt, had an important bearing on [his] after life, and he soon after, unaided and alone,
