Duncanville museum displays antique automated musical instruments

Inside a 16,000-square-foot, red-brick and sheet-metal building lies a treasure trove of antique automated musical instruments and machines once popular in parlors, drawing rooms, restaurants and circuses.

Olden Year Musical Museum houses the 500-piece collection of lumber magnate Homer DeFord. The showcase includes vintage music boxes ranging from pocket- to table-size; hurdy-gurdy pipe organs played by street musicians; classic phonographs with big brass horns; a fairground calliope that once serenaded a merry-go-round; coin-operated orchestrions that sound like orchestras; early jukeboxes and more.

It is open for group tours by appointment.

“The DeFord collection displays more types of unique self-playing musical devices than any museum of its kind,” says University of North Texas music librarian Maristella Feustle.

And, every machine works.

A look inside

At intervals along the rope-fenced aisles, interactive touch screens on movable wood stands allow visitors to see and hear prerecorded musical performances by the automated machines of yesteryear.

In a locked glass cabinet sits one of the oldest pieces in the collection — a 1790s-Swiss sur plateau music box, an ancestor of musical data storage devices such as the iPod. The size of a pocket watch, it produces music when pins on a wind-up, spring-powered revolving disc pluck the tuned teeth of a circular steel comb.

“That’s the principle behind all music boxes,” curator Rick Wilkins says.

A center section shows off one of the collection’s largest Victorian orchestral music boxes for home entertainment, the stunning walnut table model by Samuel Troll Fils of Geneva, circa 1880. To play opera arias, it employs a long, turning cylinder with myriad pins to sound a row of intricately decorated bells, as well as a powerful 24-key reed organ and zither attachment.

A miniaturized musical coal mine and a larger-than-life, automated accordion player represent the collection’s nod to the golden age of the automaton — machines with mechanized figures magically moving with the music.

A rare automaton from Mirecourt, the French town known for violin making, displays two monkeys in 18th-century finery. In a sendup of aristocrats’ musical tastes, the monkeys move their heads, eyes and mouths while bowing a violin and cello.

Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph is celebrated with an exact copy of the 1877 machine — the first to record the human voice and play it back audibly. The machine etched the voice on a fragile, tinfoil-covered cast-iron cylinder, which after a few playbacks couldn’t be used.

An original Edison Class-M phonograph, circa 1893-94, with a seamless brass horn for amplification, shows off a more durable, solid wax recording cylinder — precursor of the modern record album — capable of multiple playbacks of fantastic quality.

Large hurdy-gurdys made of reed and pipe organs or keyboardless pianos take up more display space than any other group. The collection’s smallest hurdy-gurdy organ, by G. Molinari & Sons of Brooklyn, N.Y., houses rows of ascending piccolo and flute pipes in a decorative walnut case.

Holding it by a worn leather neck strap, a street musician would have turned the crank to power up a bellows and rotate a pinned barrel to play attention-getting ditties.

The museum also contains Victorian marvels of engineering — string orchestrions with multiple instruments that perform like orchestras. Behind leaded glass oak doors of a scarce 1907 Eldorado orchestrion, an array of piano actions and percussions play. When a coin is pushed in the slot, its huge pinned barrel makes hammers strike tubular bells, snare and bass drums, cymbal and castanets, making for a mesmerizing performance.

The coin-operated 1914 Mills Novelty Co. Violano Virtuoso has a perforated music roll read by an electromagnetic device, which activates a full-size violin and nearly four dozen piano strings to create a concert-hall-quality performance with a controlled, expressive vibrato.

At the end of tours, docents throw open the doors of a smaller exhibit hall for the grand finale.

Facing visitors is a giant model-80 Bruder band organ, one of only two known to exist. In performance, a perforated music book engages its drums and organ pipes to duplicate flute, violin, trombone and trumpet sounds like a marching band. Simultaneously, two beautifully carved bell ringers on either side of an ornate stage hit their bells, and a conductor moves his hands in time with the music.

Nearby sits a 1928 Wurlitzer Caliola calliope pipe organ, which was heard in a 2009 Southwest Airlines commercial. It is encased in a towering red cabinet and features a unique motorized, dual pumping system.

The museum also displays early radios, coin-operated silent and sound film shorts and post-World War II TVs.

Building a collection

DeFord, now 94, was always a visionary, Wilkins says.

“He told me he wanted to put together the finest phonograph museum when he hired me in December 1976,” he says.

They met when DeFord answered his newspaper ad for an Edison phonograph. Wilkins restored and sold vintage machines to pay for college. After Wilkins’ graduation from the University of Texas at Arlington, DeFord sent him east to get every type of cylinder phonograph Edison made.

Wilkins returned with a full trailer hitched to his Ford station wagon. On subsequent trips, he visited New England, Chicago and the upper Midwest, and California.

“That’s where the early population centers were,” he says.

Both around the world and locally, he bought from original owners, their children, World War I veterans, dealers and at antique auctions or shows.

Over the years, the collection expanded to all kinds of automated musical machines. In 1998, Wilkins began yearly buying trips to Europe and former Soviet-bloc countries, taking with him a sizable budget.

“I discovered early on the best prices for very desirable items like music boxes, automatons, and roller organs are a whole lot cheaper near the European cities where they were made and distributed,” Wilkins says.

The growing collection moved from a storage room to its benefactor’s former showroom in the DeFord Lumber Co. offices to its current site.

In the mid 2000s, DeFord explored permanently loaning his collection; representatives from Texas A&M University, University of North Texas and Texas Christian University visited. Ultimately, a distant home and lack of control over exhibits did not appeal to the collector.

“Some campuses were going to build in three years,” DeFord says. “I wanted it now.”

At the front of the main exhibit hall, a larger-than-life portrait of Thomas Edison looks out over the collection of vintage self-playing machines.

It’s almost a nod to the museum’s mission.

Manager Homer DeFord III says he believes his grandfather founded it out of “respect for persevering inventors like Thomas Edison, his passion for mechanical music, and a desire to interest younger generations in their heritage.”

This story was originally published April 8, 2016 at 2:20 PM with the headline "Duncanville museum displays antique automated musical instruments."