Pierre Aloysius Josephs: the first bow maker of the San Francisco Bay Area

The following extract is from The Strad’s November 2021 issue feature ‘Bay Area bow makers: Bows on the bay’. To read it in full, click here to subscribe and login. The November 2021 digital magazine  and print edition  are on sale now

The very first bow maker in the San Francisco Bay Area was Pierre Aloysius Josephs. He was born in 1833 in New York, his father a prominent builder. Moving west with his family, Pierre studied violin in St Louis, Missouri, probably in the early 1850s. He developed a keen interest in violin making around this time. Eventually the family relocated to Elwood, Kansas, where he fought in the Civil War for the Union in 1861, a first lieutenant of the First Regiment Kansas Volunteer Infantry. He registered his profession as ‘jeweler’ in the 1863 Kansas military draft, an exacting and precise art that would inform his skill.

According to the family, he honed his abilities as a violin and bow maker during a series of business trips to Paris between 1864 and 1872, where he spent time at the shop of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. This claim is backed by an Ellis Island document from 1864; the influence is also clear in his workmanship. As early as 1870 he was working as a violin maker in St Joseph, Missouri, as listed in the local directory. He worked around St Joseph until 1876, when he boarded the newly incorporated railway line from St Louis to San Francisco with his nonagenarian parents, his second wife and their seven children. At first he settled in Oakland, California, moving to bustling San Francisco in 1877. He soon set up as a violin and bow maker at 1412 Kearny Street, in a three-generation household.