Mason & Hamlin -- A Tradition of Musical Excellence

Founded in Boston in 1854 by Henry Mason and Emmons Hamlin, Mason & Hamlin initially produced a unique reed organ capable of producing a variety of sounds. Later in that century, production would shift to the increasingly popular instrument – the piano.

Henry Mason was a gifted pianist who was raised in a home where hymns of the faith were part of everyday life. His father was hymn writer Lowell Mason, head of the Boston Academy of Music. He also served as music director in Lyman Beecher’s Presbyterian Church, composing a number of famous hymns including “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” “Bless Be The Tie That Binds,” and the arrangement for “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

It was the age of revivalism, and ironically, the more traditional hymnbook produced by Lowell Mason and associate Thomas Hastings would be embraced by evangelist Charles Finney, who worried that “a singing revival could never amount to much, because singing dissipated a deep feeling that was necessary for conversion.” Rejoicing in song with young converts,” he remarked, “often consumed too much time in prayer meetings.”^{Fromm, Chuck; “New Song, The Sound of Spiritual Awakening,” a paper presented to The Oxford Reading and Research Conference, April, 1983}

For their part, the two hymn writers and compilers decried “the use in revival of the ‘refuse of secular music which even the devil had abandoned,’ characterizing it as ‘being whistled by every chimney sweep and roared by every drunken sailor as he reeled home from the circus or brothel.’”^Ibid.

Mason’s son, Henry, inherited not only his father’s passion for musical excellence, he saw the church as central to its extension and preservation. Mason and Hamlin advertised their pianos and organs heavily in the Almanacs and periodicals of the Reformed Church in the United States a century ago.

On this page, we have reproduced one of Mason and Hamlin’s early ads, along with a contemporary advertisement for what is generally recognized to be the finest hand-made piano in the world. Welcome back, Mason and Hamlin. It has, indeed, been too long!