Richmond, Indiana sits right on the Indiana-Ohio border, where Interstate 70 crosses into the state.
My wife grew up there.
Just three miles from her childhood home is an abandoned brick tower she never even knew was there.
It turns out this abandoned tower played an unexpected role in American music.
We spent the day driving through her childhood. Her elementary school. The house where she spent hours shooting free throws in the driveway. The streets she knew by heart.
Then we drove down a narrow road to a small park.
Rising above the trees, the tower looked completely out of place. Empty windows. Weathered brick.
The tower is all that's left of the Starr Piano Company.
A century ago, this wasn't a lonely brick tower in a quiet park. It was part of a twenty-five-acre industrial complex along the Whitewater River. Most of the complex disappeared in the 1970s. Fire claimed another of the remaining buildings in 1993. Today, the tower and a single factory building are all that remain.
What happened here outlived almost everything built around it.
The Starr Piano Company opened in 1872 as a piano manufacturer. Business was good, and over the next several decades Starr grew into one of the largest piano manufacturers in the world.
For many companies, success is enough. Starr wasn't content to keep building pianos.
The company recognized that music itself was changing. Up until that point, for thousands of years, hearing music required a musician. Churches had organists. Families gathered around pianos after dinner. Bands played in parks and town squares. If nobody was performing, there was no music.
Then came the player piano. Instead of a person sitting at the keyboard, a long roll of perforated paper passed through the instrument. Each hole told the piano which key to strike and when. The piano played itself. To people living at the end of the nineteenth century, it must have seemed almost magical.
But Starr also recognized the technology's limitation. A player piano playing Beethoven wasn't Beethoven. It was a machine recreating Beethoven's music. It could reproduce every note perfectly, but it couldn't preserve the performance.
A player piano could preserve the composition.
Recorded sound could preserve the performer.
Starr understood the difference.
Recorded sound was something entirely different.
For the first time in history, a performance itself—not just the notes written on a page—could be captured forever.
Today you can open Spotify and have millions of songs available before you've even decided what you want to hear. Most of us never stop to think what that would have meant to our great-grandparents. Before recorded sound, hearing a favorite musician usually meant standing in the same room at the same time. When the performance ended, it disappeared forever.
Recorded sound changed all of that.
The phonograph, the early record player that brought recorded music into American homes, wasn't just another product. It threatened the very business Starr had built. Rather than resist the change, the company decided to become part of it.
Starr began manufacturing phonographs and eventually launched its own record label: Gennett Records.
Every record company had access to the same technology. The difference wasn't in the machines. It was in the music they believed people wanted to hear.
The largest labels generally focused on artists they believed would appeal to established audiences. Gennett was willing to record musicians who had not yet entered the musical mainstream.
That decision brought musicians from around the country to Richmond.
They arrived by train. The recording studio was a converted lumber drying kiln on the factory grounds — a rough rectangular building originally used to cure wood for piano manufacturing. It stood directly beside the railroad tracks. Its walls were packed with sawdust to dampen echoes. Rugs hung from the ceiling. Recording sessions paused whenever trains rumbled past outside.
It wasn't an impressive studio.
It didn't need to be.
Louis Armstrong made some of his earliest commercial recordings here, long before he became one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.
So did Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Hoagy Carmichael, and hundreds of other musicians whose recordings would help shape American music.
Jazz wasn't born in Richmond. Neither were the blues or country music.
But some of their earliest recordings were made here because Gennett was willing to record musicians and styles that much of the industry had overlooked.
The recordings weren't made for future historians.
They were made for listeners.
A century later, they have become part of America's musical heritage.
Today, almost everything the Starr Piano Company built is gone.
The music isn't.
And that is the story behind the place.
