The Mystery of the Coolidges’ Christmas Piano—Solved
In December 1923, the Baldwin Piano Campaign ran a national ad campaign highlighting the delivery of a piano to Grace Coolidge and family at the White House
By Rejoice Scherry
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
Grace Coolidge’s love of music was well known in the 1920s. The first lady frequently attended the symphony, and she even hosted performances at the White House.
Four months after the Coolidges moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Baldwin Piano Company, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, gave Grace a Model K baby grand piano. According to a national print ad campaign organized by Baldwin, the piano was installed in the White House’s Lincoln Room on December 15, 1923. It was intended for personal use by Grace and her sons, who were then learning banjo and ukulele.
These are the facts known about the piano that now stands in the great room of the Museum and Education Center at the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. But another detail has long played a prominent role in the piano’s story: the instrument supposedly arrived at the White House via airplane, becoming the first piano ever to take flight.
That assertion, it turns out, is false. How did the tale get passed down as history, and how did the decades-old oral tradition unravel?
As the administrator of the Coolidge Historic Site, I was setting up the piano for a concert in September 2023. In doing so, I came across a photocopy of the Baldwin ad under the piano’s lid. The ad, which featured a cartoon Santa Claus playing piano, was dated December 1923. So far, so good. But then I took another look at the label on the piano that dated the instrument’s origin: “circa 1925.”
Wanting to clear up the date discrepancy, I realized that the first piano flown on an airplane probably would have generated press coverage. So I went to newspaper archives.
My research turned up an article from the Brooklyn Daily Times dated April 23, 1925. The headline read, “Two Baby Grand Pianos and 6 Men Fly from Mineola to Washington on First Trip of Sikorsky Plane.” Something wasn’t adding up. Baldwin pianos were made in Cincinnati, but the airplane departed from Long Island. Why take pianos hundreds of miles to New York, only to fly them to Washington, D.C.?
Then I found a photograph of the pianos being unloaded from the airplane. The label on the crate around one instrument was only partially visible in the photo, but I could see the last three letters: “-ACH.” Knowing that Brambach pianos were made in New York, I soon found a Brambach ad that boasted about the flight. “Brambach Baby Grand Pianos Shipped by Plane,” the ad’s headline read.
Clearly the Baldwin piano at Plymouth Notch wasn’t involved in that maiden flight. So how did the airplane story enter the tale of the Coolidges’ piano?
Digging further, I found news stories from 1925 reporting that one Brambach piano was intended to become a charitable gift and the second was to find a home with Grace Coolidge. In a special ceremony, piano dealer Edward Droop gave the keys of one piano to Grace, who in turn handed them over to Friendship Settlement House in Washington, D.C. What happened to the second piano? The newspapers did not state whether it was delivered to the White House as planned.
Mrs. Coolidge donating one of the Brambach pianos to Friendship Settlement House, 1925
But in her autobiography, Grace Coolidge described the process of leaving the White House in 1929. Over the course of seven weeks, she wrote, the family packed up “about three thousand books,” “rugs of various sizes, china, glass, and silver”—and “two pianos.” It seems fair to surmise that the second airplane piano made it to the Coolidge White House, and that this instrument was one of the two the family took with them when they moved out.
It was John Coolidge, her elder son, who first shared the flight story when he donated the Baldwin piano to the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation after his mother’s death. One cannot fault him for the mistake. He was not a permanent resident of the White House, having attended preparatory school and then Amherst College. He probably would not have been present for the delivery of the Brambach piano in April 1925.
It’s tempting to “print the legend,” given that the story of the cargo plane used to fly the pianos is a remarkable one. The man who built that plane, Igor Sikorsky, had fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He developed his cargo plane, the Sikorsky S-29A, in a chicken coop, using parts scavenged from junkyards. Sikorsky built the S-29A with an investment of $5,000 (about $92,000 in 2024 dollars) from the pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, a fellow Russian émigré. Sikorsky would later develop the first successful helicopter.
But the Baldwin piano doesn’t need this unusual backstory to remain a cherished item at the Coolidge Historic Site. Grace Coolidge treasured the piano as a keepsake of her days as first lady, and therefore museum visitors revel in seeing it as well. With the passage of time, historical details sometimes get confused or conflated. What has always remained true is the beautiful sound the piano produces.
Rejoice Scherry is the site administrator for the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, Vermont.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.