The campaign to designate the Calumet as an area of national significance highlights regional themes including industry and culture.ⁱ Both enabled the Perfection Musical String Company’s violin string industry dominance.

Thanks to the creation of its canal system, Chicago underwent explosive growth and became a major metropolitan hub in the late nineteenth century. From 1830 to 1890, its population ballooned from 100 to more than a million. Fueled by this new infrastructure and worker base, industry took off, spurring economic growth in turn. Along with the expanded populace and the contributions of industrial barons keen to market Chicago to its coastal peers and competitors as worldly and artistic, not merely
commercial,ⁱⁱ the city’s newfangled wealth ushered in a period of cultural flourishing.ⁱⁱⁱ

These commercial benefactors – most of whom had made their fortunes on the backbone of Calumet regional production – invested heavily in the music industry specifically. Local manufacturing and transportation resources enabled instrument fabrication, recording, and music publishing.^iv Two major music houses founded in the late 19th century, Lyon & Healy and William Lewis & Son,^v drew experienced immigrant craftsmen from a variety of European countries and violin-making traditions. The convergence of their skills and styles gave rise to a Chicago violin-making school, and the city earned the national prominence in music business and culture the barons had envisioned.^vi

Perfection’s story highlights the extent of industry leadership in the Calumet region, which also drove Chicago’s economic development. The area produced everything from the lion’s share of America’s steel to 95% of U.S. orchestra’ violin strings.^vii The crop of American string-makers was small and specialized. The nearest such business to Perfection was in Michigan, and there were no more than a dozen other “winders” in the nation – all the rest along the coasts. Perfection sold more
than a quarter million strings a year – but to only four customers. Shipping in bulk to three jobbers in Chicago and one in Cleveland, who packaged them under personal
trademarks, then distributed them to music stores, allowed the small factory to devote its attention to the details of production.^viii

Here was another example of Chicago’s commercial landscape furnishing music manufacturing success. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the city’s wholesaling heyday. Like wholesalers, Perfection’s source of raw material, the local Union Stockyards, thrived on the city’s transportation networks and vibrant
consumer economy. By the mid-twentieth century, though, the fledgling national highway system and invention of refrigerated trucks rendered meat transport by railroad less of a competitive advantage. A centralized meatpacking industry was no longer needed; by the ‘70s, production had moved to rural satellites. In these freshly
post-industrial conditions (which extended across the Calumet region’s sectors), Perfection shuttered in 1988. The supply of sheep and hog gut from regional sources
had dried up, and imported Italian material did not compare.

The company’s trajectory charts that of Chicago and the Calumet region. Taking advantage of each location’s resources, it buttressed the Calumet economy and
elevated Chicago’s cultural standing on the national playing field in turn.

—Isabel Salvin, ’25 (Public Policy)