This piano was built by the Connecticut Chapter of PTG in 1975 on the occasion of the American bicentennial celebration. It loosely copies an instrument in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, thought at that time perhaps to have been made by John Behrent or James Juhan in Philadelphia, who supposedly built some of the earliest American pianos. The piano’s original nameboard had been replaced with one from a later John Sellers piano. In any case, the replica represents an early American square piano, modeled after Germanic types, with an action that was the predecessor to those referred to nowadays as “Viennese.”
