Until its recent acquisition, the instrument was the heirloom of a family in Rocky River, Ohio hoping its use would continue elsewhere. Since such instrument was built more for a domestic, parlor-type room, it is not normally suitable to declamatory performances in large spaces.

The firm that produced the instrument was Bishop & Child. According to 1859-60 issues of the Painesville Telegraph (as quoted in a 1992 letter by a curator at the Lake County Historical Society), Mr Ediwn Milton Bishop, born in Massachusetts, had worked as a foreman at an instrument-building establishment in Buffalo, New York, before relocating to Cleveland to establish a melodeon manufactory. Additional records at the Society showed a business address of 170 Seneca, that would put it in downtown at West Third Street (according to one table in CWRU's online Encyclopedia of Cleveland History). Despite apparent initial success, employing as many as 14 people (including two tuners) and demand fully meeting supply. A late 1856 issue of the Plain Dealer announces the professional partnership of Bishop and 'Pearly A Child', which was alternatively spelled 'Childs' (in a brief mention in the same publication in 1971)) that Child(s) had 'disappeared in the 1860s from any records we could find'. Bishop's younger brother, Christopher, was a piano tuner in Painesville and would conceivably have been involved in the business, if not as a nominal partner.

However, the business appears to have been short-lived, and not many instruments produced: it is possible that the business was liquidated by the end of the 1860s, and that this could correlate to EM Bishop's subsequent return to New York--where he passed away in the Watervliet/(West) Troy region in 1899, aged 83--and the (disgraceful) absence of a headstone at the Woodland Cemetery in Cleveland, where he was interred along with three other family members--including a boy that passed away from diptheria at the age of 12.

There is further research to be done.