The Cunningham Piano Company (founded in 1891 by Patrick J. Cunningham) manufactured acoustic upright, grand, and player pianos until 1943 when the factory ceased production. The founder, Patrick Cunningham, was an Irish migrant with woodworking experience. In their first decade of manufacturing, Cunningham Piano Company gained recognition and became a popular piano-making company in Philadelphia's Germantown Neighborhood.
During the 1920s, the heyday of the pneumatic player piano, Cunningham Piano Company was the largest manufacturer of player pianos in Philadelphia and shipped their wares to the entire East Coast of the United States.
Noted musicians used the instruments, including Vincent Persichetti, a native Philadelphian and noted composer and professor at the Juilliard School and George Gershwin who used a Cunningham Piano to write his opera "Porgy and Bess" in Folly Beach, South Carolina.
The Great Depression was a great blow to the business. Before the start of World War II, Cunningham Piano Company ceased production.
After World War II
After the Second World War, Louis Cohen, a young piano technician who had worked for Patrick J. Cunningham, took over Cunningham Piano Company. Cohen determined that building a small number of pianos by hand without the national recognition of companies like Mason & Hamlin, Steinway, or Baldwin was difficult in the economic climate of the post World War II era. He gathered talent from those manufacturers to set up a restoration facility in Germantown, Philadelphia, a new location.