page_title: Lyon & Healy
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Lyon & Healy / History
context_page_description: Lyon & Healy Harps, Inc. is an American musical instrument manufacturer based in Chicago, Illinois and is a subsidiary of Salvi Harps. Today best known for concert harps, the company's Chicago headquarters and manufacturing facility contains a showroom and concert hall. George W. Lyon and Patrick J. Healy began the company in 1864 as a sheet music shop. By the end of the 19th century, they manufactured a wide range of musical instruments—including not only harps, but guitars, mandolins, banjos, ukuleles and various brass and percussion instruments.
  Today, Lyon & Healy harps are widely played by professional musicians, since they are one of the few makers of harps for orchestral use—which are known as concert harps or pedal harps. Lyon & Healy also makes smaller folk harps or lever harps that use levers to change string pitch instead of pedals. In the 1980s, Lyon & Healy also began to manufacture electroacoustic harps and, later, solid body electric harps.
context_section_description: George W. Lyon, a native of Northborough, Massachusetts; and Patrick J. Healy, born in Mallow, Ireland, founded the company in 1864, after they moved from Boston to start a sheet music shop for music publisher Oliver Ditson. Determining Lyon & Healy's history is complicated because its building and company records were destroyed in two fires, including the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Two smaller fires did little damage to the firm and did not result in data loss.
  Company letters and trade catalogs don't provide exact dates that would reveal when Lyon & Healy began manufacturing instruments. An article in the Musical Courier states that Lyon & Healy began manufacturing instruments in 1885. Clearly, Lyon & Healy was making fretted string instruments in the 1880s, with Washburn (guitars, mandolins, banjos, and zithers) as their premier line. By the 1900s, if not earlier, Lyon & Healy might well have been manufacturing bowed string instruments.
  According to Vintage Guitar magazine,  "Circa 1900, the firm was so large it manufactured under a host of sub-brands; Washburn is perhaps the most recognized, though Leland, Lakeside, and American Conservatory are still seen."  
  Lyon & Healy also made various percussion instruments. Later, Lyon & Healy began manufacturing brass instruments, possibly as early as the 1890s. Lyon & Healy also repaired instruments, and offered engraving services. Complicating matters still further, Lyon & Healy engraved instruments that it retailed but did not actually manufacture. In its 1892 catalog, it claimed that it manufactured 100,000 instruments annually.
  The company is known to have made other instruments, including reed organs and pianos. Lyon & Healy evidently began manufacturing these instruments around 1876 in its factories in Chicago and nearby cities. George W. Lyon patented his cottage upright in 1878 and it was sold under the Lyon & Healy name.
  Lyon retired in 1889 and Healy became the company's first president. That year, Lyon & Healy built their first harp. Healy wanted to develop a harp better suited to the rigors of the American climate than available European models.  They successfully produced a harp notable for its strength, pitch reliability, and freedom from unwanted vibration. Previously, most harps in North America were made by small groups of craftsmen in France, England, Ireland, or Italy.
  In 1890, Lyon & Healy introduced the Style 23 Harp, still a popular and recognizable design. It has 47 strings, highly decorative floral carving on the top of the column, base, and feet, and a fleur de lis pattern at the bottom of the column. It is available in a gold version. It is 74 inches (190 cm) tall, and weighs about 37 kilograms (82 lb). Lyon & Healy produces one of the most ornate and elaborate harps in the world, the Louis XV, which includes carvings of leaves, flowers, scrolls, and shells along its neck and kneeblock, as well the soundboard edges.
  Lyon would later form a new company with E.A. Potter called Lyon & Potter, and remained there until his death on January 12, 1894. Healy died of pneumonia on April 3, 1905.
  In the 1890s the company—which used the slogan,"Everything in music"—began building pipe organs. In 1894 Robert J. Bennett came to Lyon & Healy from the Hutchings company of Boston to head their organ department. The largest surviving Lyon & Healy pipe organ is at the Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica in Chicago. It is a large organ of four manuals and 57 ranks of pipes.
  They also made small pipe organs. An example survives at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Aspen Colorado. It is a two manual tracker with a 30 note straight pedalboard and 7 ranks. It is believed to have been built around 1900, and can still be pumped by hand.
  By the 1900s, Lyon & Healy was one of the largest music publishers in the world, and was a major producer of musical instruments. However, In late 1920s, Lyon & Healy sold its brass musical instrument manufacturing branch (see "New Langwill Index"). In the 1970s, the firm concentrated solely upon making and selling harps.
  In 1928, Lyon & Healy introduc
caption: Prospectus (1900s) on Welte Orchestrion
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