As 11-year-old Sakatah Stevenson glided her hands up and down the black and white keys of a piano, she sent each note echoing through the Rice County History Museum Thursday afternoon.
Above the piano keys, the words “Schimmel patent. Faribault, Minn.” appear in gold lettering, indicating the piano’s origin in the Schimmel Piano Factory. The piano, which is more than ten times the age of Sakatah, is available for any and all to play during the Rice County Fair from 12:30-7:30 p.m. until Saturday and 12:30-3:30 p.m. Sunday.
Sakatah has only been playing piano for four years, has a teacher in Northfield, can play duets with her grandmother and even wrote her own song called “Fruit of the Spirit.” She said she’s played the piano at the fair for the last few years.
“And she happened to get an award last year from her piano teacher because she’s very willing to play at church or to come here and do this,” said Sue Feyereisn, Sakatah’s grandmother. “We went up at Christmastime to play at a couple nursing homes. She and I both played Christmas songs.”
Sakatah and Feyereisn sat side-by-side and played “Great Balls Of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis, finishing to the applause of the entire group of visitors and staff of the museum Thursday.
Among those staff stood Dave Nichols, the executive director of the Rice County Historical Society.
“These are all from what were made here in town,” he said. “And so this is the only one we actually let people play. During the fair, we just have folks that need to do their piano recital. As part of their learning how to play, they get to come in and show off. So we’ve got a couple of different groups rotating every year.”
Those unable to make it to the fair aren’t completely out of luck, he mentioned.
“I mean, some of the students that come through here do play really well,” he said while listening to Sakatah play. “We do make it a point to keep that piano tuned up. Obviously, we let people play it all throughout the year, but the fair is the biggest time.”
He explained that the pianos were designed by an Austrian immigrant named Fred Schimmel. Schimmel moved to and opened a factory in Faribault in 1892, the Schimmel Piano Factory, which operated until the 1930s.
“Part of what ended up killing that company was, in the 1930s, it became really hard to get the wood and the equipment from Germany to make them because World War II was starting,” he said. “And so they became too logistically difficult to keep making.”
Among the pianos in the museum is a vertical grand piano, also made by Schimmel. Visitors are not permitted to play that one, especially since it’s one of five in the world.
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