Bill's Stories: Maine Violin Maker #4

Benjamin Foss

I hope you enjoyed the first three stories about Maine violin makers, as told to me by 84-year-old violin entrepreneur and self-taught repairman Bill Dalbec. You can find the other three starting here with #1. You can find the second story here (about Hector Durgin) and the third one here (about Joseph Schellinger).

I met this fellow who was playing a violin made by a Portland maker called Bud Foss -- Benjamin Foss. I thought it was interesting, and not too much longer after that, a guy brought me a Benjamin Foss violin to see if I’d sell for him. Well I’d known that your student Scott T. had one, so I says, “Yeah, okay.” The guy was from Belfast, Maine, and he said he had paid $3,000 for the violin.

We tried to sell it, without much luck. We ended up putting it in Skinner’s auction, and it only got an $800 offer, but he decided to sell it anyway.

So one day, I’m at my house and the phone rings, and a guy says, “I’ve got a Foss violin,” and I says, “Well, they don’t really sell that good, I don’t know that I’m very interested.”

They were well-made violins, but the varnish was very bad. Somewhere around the turn of the 19th century, people sold a lot of bad varnish to violin makers all over North America and in Europe, and they show up a lot, you can tell them the minute you see them.

But anyway, this guy on the phone said he was related to Ben Foss. He said Benjamin Foss was his great grandfather. He wanted me to meet him in Buxton to show it to me. So I said “Okay, I’ll meet you in the new Hannafords parking lot there.”

I went out there and met up with him and I said, “So what do you want for the violin?”

He says, “Well I gotta get $350.”

I said, “I’m not gonna give you $350.”

He says, “Well then, it’s going to the dump.”

I says, “What?”

He says, “If I don’t get my money for this violin, my great-grandfather’s violin, it’s going to the dump.”

I says, “Why would you do that?”

He says, “Cuz it’s worth it and I want the money.”

So in the end I paid him the money. And I decided to do some genealogy on this maker with my wife, who loves doing genealogy, so we started searching.

When I looked up Benjamin Foss, his address in the 1900 census was given as 212 Cumberland Ave. Well that struck me as strange. When I came to Portland in 1978, I had an office, and it was at 212 Cumberland Avenue. And I worked in that building for 40 years. It was a 17-story high rise, the second highest building north of Boston for about 50 years.

I’d known there used to be a lot of tenement houses, rooming houses that were down there on Cumberland Avenue.

So I decided to look into this a little further, and I found that what Foss did for a living was not just make violins. He was a well known violin maker in that he had a violin shop further down Congress Street. Same building where Steve Brown had his violin shop not so long ago.

But I found out that the way Foss made most of his living was a little different. He made door hinges. He would get sheets of brass and shape them into door hinges, and do decorative hinges and heavy brass ones.

[Foss was also an inventor — he created what’s known as the “Yankee ratchet screwdriver” which was marketed starting in 1895 and later bought by Stanley.]

Well, I had that Foss violin for a long time, until this doctor from Rockport Maine, an emergency room doctor, came to my house one day looking for an instrument. He had a band that he played with.

I showed him the violin and noticed then that it was deeper bodied than most violins, with a deep, dark sound to it, and played really nice although the varnish was quite poor.

It occurred to me that maybe the violin was actually a viola, a 14” viola. So I strung it up as a viola, and it didn’t sound very good. I restrung it as a 14” violin, and it sounded great.

I ended up selling it to the doctor, and later on he told me that he eventually sold it to a descendant of Benjamin Foss.

Here on my phone, I have a picture of one of his violins and his gravestone in Albion, Maine. See, it says Benjamin F. on the stone, which actually stands for his middle name.

They were good violins, so this always brings me to the question, how did all these people in Maine learn to make violins? This guy Foss was the son of a farmer, born in 1861, lived to 1938, pretty close to 80 years.

Well, there was an avenue they could take. In 1898, there was a book published, and it was presented to the public as “To all farmers who want to make money in the winter — you buy this book and during the winter you make violins and sell them in the spring.” And there’s a very good chance that’s how these rural violin makers in Maine learned -- from that self-taught book they could buy in the mail.