UB's mystery piano may be one of Buffalo’s first pianos

When James D. Sheppard decided to head to Buffalo from England, he could not stand the thought of arriving in the “primitive” new world without his musical instruments — especially his pianos.

His beloved instruments began their journey in Frome, England, where they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and arrived in Buffalo via a mule-drawn barge along the recently completed Erie Canal. His pianos were then carried on the shoulders of six men from the docks up Main Street to the old courthouse. Sheppard, who the Buffalo Historical Society considers to be the “Father of Music in Buffalo,” would open his music store there, on the site of the current Buffalo and Erie County Library.

Some years later, a piano that is thought to be one of Sheppard’s pianos would end up in UB’s Department of Music, where it later took one more trip — this time, in the back of a Subaru.

How exactly the piano ended up at UB is a bit unclear, according to Devin Zimmer, piano technician in the Department of Music.

“There’s no real evidence that it was ever given to the music department. It just kind of showed up on our doorstep. And this is well before my time. I started here in 2016 and it had been sitting in the corner of Slee Hall for probably 20 years before that,” Zimmer recalls.

He says the piano was in rough shape and barely recognizable as a piano.

“It was being used as a sign-in table at the top of the stairs. It was very weak on its legs, and the veneer was peeling away. It had been restored at some point and all the chemicals that they used to strip the cabin seeped into the wood, and that further degraded the structural integrity of the instrument. So, I put it in storage. A cool, old thing.”

Ongoing discussions about the history of music in Buffalo — and specifically about James D. Sheppard — with colleagues Derek Steykowski and Brian Moseley gave Zimmer the incentive to take a closer look at that “cool, old thing” he put into storage.

“It’s pretty well documented that James Sheppard was one of the early people to bring musical instruments to Buffalo,” Zimmer explains. “He probably brought two or three pianos in crates across the Atlantic and then up the canal, and so I started to look at our piano a little bit more seriously. There’s a maker’s mark and there’s documented evidence that this piano was built by Thomas Tomkinson in Soho, London, in 1818-19. And so, it just fit the context of an instrument that would have come to Buffalo in 1827, and that just made me a little bit more interested in it and in trying to find out what I could find about James Sheppard.”

Zimmer examined the piano thoroughly but wanted to get a better look inside the structure without further disrupting the integrity of the instrument. He asked around, and knowing that UB is a multidisciplinary and collaborative community, he reached out to Daniel Bednarek, professor of radiology and neurosurgery in the Department of Radiology in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Bednarek oversees UB’s Radiology Museum and Zimmer asked Bednarek if he could help take some X-rays of the piano.

“Dr. Bednarek connected Devin with a couple of our graduate students, Emily Vanderbilt and Martina Orji, who run our angiography equipment and we were happy to arrange a time for them to bring the piano to us,” says Liza Gutierrez, laboratory director of the Canon Stroke and Vascular Research Center.

So this meant yet another journey for the piano — this time in the back of a Subaru.

“I don’t own a car, and we had to get the piano from North Campus to the downtown medical campus for the X-rays, so it was actually my apprentice who came and helped out in his Subaru,” Zimmer says.  

Once the piano arrived on the eighth floor of the Clinical and Translational Research Center, Gutierrez worked with the graduate students to take the detailed X-ray images. She says they took numerous images of the entire piano to offer Zimmer the best possible view of how the piano was constructed. The images were so detailed they identified a small surprise.

“We even found a penny inside the piano. It’s from 1926,” Gutierrez says. 

While it appears the piano is far too damaged to repair, Zimmer is hoping to build a replica for the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal.

“The next step is to create a couple of posters — a digital one and a real one — so we can raise awareness of the project and hopefully generate some donations to build the replica,” he says.  

Since Zimmer would build the replica on his own time outside his duties at UB, he’s looking for assistance in purchasing the lumber and tools necessary for the project.

If the replica is funded, Zimmer has some tentative plans to give the new piano its own travel journey.

“The Maritime Center is building a canal boat that would start off in Buffalo and carry the replica all the way along the canal to New York City,” he says.

And the replica may even have more adventures in the future.

“It could live in a museum. It could be on tour. It could go to Albany… there’s no telling where it could go.”