A Brief History of the Conn Company (1874-present)*

by Margaret Downie Banks, Ph.D.
Curator of Musical Instruments
National Music Museum
Vermillion, South Dakota

© Copyright 1997 by The National Music Museum.
All Rights Reserved.
No portion of this site, including this page and any of the separate pages, may be copied, retransmitted, reposted, duplicated or otherwise used without the express written permission of The National Music Museum.

*Excerpted and updated from Elkhart's Brass Roots: An Exhibition to Commemorate the 150th Anniversary of C. G. Conn's Birth and the 120th Anniversary of the Conn Company by Margaret Downie Banks (Vermillion, South Dakota: The Shrine to Music Museum, 1994).

Musical Instruments and Accessories by Conn

Advertisement for a Conn mellophone, ca. 1915. From the Conn Archives of the National Music Museum.   © Copyright 1997 by The National Music Museum.

Dr. Banks has been researching the more than 1,200 different instrument models produced by the Conn Company from 1874 to the present for more than a dozen years. This research is complicated due to the fact that all of the company's early records were destroyed in two factory fires in 1883 and 1910. Furthermore, the company's records since 1910 were systematically destroyed in the early 1970s, when the corporate headquarters were moved out of Elkhart for the first time in the company's history.

Reconstructing the Conn story and a comprehensive listing of their products, then, has focused upon the location, collection, and examination of various types of source material including 1) the actual instruments and accessories produced by the company; 2) published company catalogs, periodicals, photographs, films, copies of patents, and related documents; 3) interviews and correspondence with former Conn employees; 4) court and other legal records; and, 5) Elkhart city newspapers, trade periodicals, and other publications. Donations of research materials to the Conn Archives at the National Music Museum will be acknowledged by the Museum and qualify as tax-deductible donations to a non-profit institution.

More than 500 musical instruments and accessories made by the Conn Company have been collected and/or donated to the Museum (an accredited, non-profit institution). A major exhibition of approximately 50 of these instruments is on permanent display in the Everist Gallery.

If you have a Conn instrument and are willing to provide specific information about it for use in Dr. Banks' comprehensive database of Conn instrument models, please click here for further information.

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For further information, please contact:

Dr. Margaret Downie Banks, Curator of Musical Instruments
National Music Museum
The University of South Dakota
414 East Clark Street
Vermillion, SD 57069-2390

E-mail: mbanks@usd.edu

This page updated April 5, 2000.
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