Back in the 1950s and 1960s I had occasion to do some work in the
greater Detroit area and had a partner named Bill Nelem, since
deceased.  Bill and I were, at one time or another, in probably more
than a dozen of the homes of automobile company owners and other people
of similar wealth.

Of all the dozen or more homes, I don't recall a single one that didn't
include in it have a fairly large roll-playing pipe organ (often with
a Steinway Duo-Art grand attached), a fine concert reproducing grand or
some other automatic musical instrument.  Within the time of about ten
years almost all of these instruments had been hunted down and "taken"
for ridiculously low prices.

On several times I had the pleasure of servicing automatic musical
instruments in the Chicago area, including one in a huge three-story
mansion north of Chicago that at one time had a Double Mills Violano
with drum cabinet at one end of a dance floor that completely took up
the entire third floor of the mansion, and a matching Mills Magnetic
Expression Piano at the other end.  I actually saw these instruments in
a photograph that was near the beautiful grand Steinway Concert model
Duo-art in another part of the house.  When I inquired about the Mills
instruments in the picture I was told that they had been removed by
a previous owner of the mansion.

It took me almost twenty five years to locate and purchase the Double
Mills (minus the drum cabinet) in San Antonio, Texas, and another eight
years to locate and obtain the matching Magnetic Piano, in Beloit,
Wisconsin.  These instruments were both of oak cabinets and with
different capitals than any other I'd ever seen, looking sort of like
a fleur-de-lis.

In the process of searching I did come into possession of the Aeolian
8-rank player pipe organ that had been originally installed in the
governor's mansion in Ohio.  In fact, I still have the collection of
rolls that was with that organ.  The buyer wasn't interested in the
Aeolian rolls so I still have them all.

It seems that quite a number of boats on the Great Lakes also had
automatic musical instruments on them, too.  If someone is interested
they might even find a really instrument on the bottom of one or more
of the Great Lakes, although it might be water-logged by now.

Over the years I've also been in a number of lodges: Masonic, Odd
Fellows, Elks, Moose, Eagles, Knights of Pythias and some others
that had or sometime in the past have had automatic musical instruments
of various description.  Of course, many movie houses, especially the
smaller ones, had roll players from the days of silent pictures.  The
larger houses usually had live musicians or often a pipe organ with
organist.

It might surprise you to learn that after the first calliopes were
installed on riverboats in the 1850s, within five years more than five
thousand riverboats in the United States were equipped with steam
calliopes.  As the useful life of a riverboat often was not long due
the many snags in the rivers there should be a good supply of calliope
whistles resting on the bottoms of many of the rivers in the United
States.  Now you know where to look.  <Grin>  This latter information
I gleaned from a nice book I have about the history of riverboats in
the United States.

For what it's worth
Hal Davis