Chesbro Music Company

Chesbro Music Company is a privately owned American manufacturer and wholesaler of musical instruments, musical instrument accessories and sheet music. Chesbro Music was founded in 1911 and is based in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Chesbro owns Teton Guitars, and has been run by female CEOs since 1953.Early HistoryHorace Chesbro, an 1897 violin studies graduate of the Northern Indiana Normal School in Valparaiso, Indiana, and his brother, Harry, began Chesbro Music Company in a storefront in Idaho Falls, Idaho in 1911. Having manufactured upright pianos in Seattle, Washington, they continued selling pianos and delivered them via horse drawn wagon to rural Idaho communities.In 1925, Horace Chesbro started school band programs before public schools began funding and staffing their own music programs. A year later, Chesbro Music was the first to introduce the rural Northwest to recorded music with the wind-up Edison Chippendale Console Disc Phonograph. Through the Great Depression, Chesbro Music continued operation by honoring debt or credit with trade and housing employees in-store. By the late 1930's, Chesbro Music began offering jobbing (wholesale) franchises. Horace's son, Henry Chesbro, took over Chesbro Music Company as president in 1945 and began nationally wholesaling newly introduced LP records.