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- Mathias Peter M?ller (commonly known as M.P. M?ller) was a prolific Danish organ builder. He was a native of the Danish island of Bornholm. He founded the M.P. Moller Pipe Organ Company in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 1875. The city of Hagerstown took notice of M?ller's early successes and induced him to move his business to that city to help make Hagerstown a viable business center in Western Maryland. The result was M. P. M?ller, Inc. and the company remained in business until 1992, with a production of over 11,000 instruments.
The M.P Moller Motor Car Company of Hagerstown Maryland is remembered today as the producer of the Dagmar, an elegant early twenties sports roadster named after the owner?s eldest daughter. Produced in small numbers between 1922 and 1927, the Dagmar competed against mid-priced luxury cars offered by Cadillac, Packard, Peerless and Pierce-Arrow.
The firm's owner and namesake was a Danish immigrant named Mathias Peter M?ller (originally spelled M?ller), born September 29, 1854 in Bornholm, a large Danish-controlled island located just south of Sweden in the Baltic Sea. Danish records list his christening in the village of ?stermarie, Bornholm on October 8, 1854, his parents being Niels J?rgen M?ller and Ane Cathrine Pedersen. The Washington County, Maryland history of 1906 erroneously states his birthdate as ?September 29, 1855? and that he is ?a son of Nelce J. and Johanna (Heldebrand) Moller?.
After serving an apprenticeship with an Allinge cabinet-maker, M?ller set sail for America in 1872 where a job awaited him in Warren, Pennsylvania where he went to work for Peter Greenlund, a Bornholm-born cabinetmaker. Soon afterwards M?ller relocated to Erie, Pennsylvania where he was employed by the well-known Buffalo, New York pipe organ builders Derrick & Felgemaker, who had recently relocated their operations to Erie.
After three years with the firm, M?ller built an organ on his own design, which was sold to the Swedish Lutheran Church in Warren, Pennsylvania. In the spring of 1876, he went to Philadelphia, where he manufactured and sold four more instruments, one of which built expressly for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.
In 1877 M?ller moved to Greencastle, Pennsylvania were he took on a partner, John W. Brenisholtz. Located at 42 East Franklin Street, M?ller, Brenisholtz and Co. produced both reed and pipe organs for the growing populations of south-central Pennsylvania, Eastern West Virginia and northern Maryland.
M?ller sold out his interest in the Greencastle firm after a solicitation by several prominent Hagerstown citizens, among them U.S. Senator McComas and Governor Hamilton, convinced him to establish an organ works in Maryland.
He moved to Hagerstown in March of 1881 where he began in a very modest way what was to become the largest and most-widely known organ factory in the United States.
M?ller set up shop in April, 1881 in a small building located near the Western Maryland Railroad on Potomac Street where he and a small staff produced organs for the parishes of Maryland and southeastern Pennsylvania.
On July 6th 1892, M?ller married Julia May Belle Greenlund, the daughter of Peter Greenlund, his first boss in America and to the blessed union was born had four children: Mathias Peter jr., Louise, Mary Dagmar and Martha.
The original M?ller plant burned down in 1895, after which the City fathers deeded a North Prospect Street plot to M?ller, allowing the struggling firm to stay in business, which commenced in a brand-new brick factory in January of 1896.
By 1902, the factory had 50,000 square feet of floor space, offices and sheds. It was on the western side of the factory complex where the actual work of building organs took place and where raw materials arrived by rail.
The history and success of the M.P. Moller Organ Company is far too large and complex a subject to covered in any greater detail as this write-up tells the story of his success in the automotive field, which begins with the 1902 organization of the Crawford Automobile Co.
This database researched and compiled by Norman Lee Madsen, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 21 July 2015.
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1854 - 1937 (82 år)
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