Nevada City Music Hall

The story

In the 1940s, while Montana saloons, dance halls, and hotels were quietly scrapping their out-of-date automated music machines for sleek jukeboxes, Charles and Sue Bovey stepped in as rescue collectors. They began buying up every mechanical orchestrion, nickelodeon, and player piano they could find—including automated violins built in Chicago that once entertained miners in Butte bars. To shelter what became the largest public collection of automated music machines in North America, Bovey didn't build a modern museum. In 1959, he salvaged Yellowstone National Park’s 1910 Canyon Lodge Recreation Hall, took it apart timber by timber, and reassembled it right off Highway 287 in Nevada City.

Inside, the high-ceilinged wooden hall houses a bizarre mechanical orchestra: Paris-made Gavioli fairground organs, early-1900s arcade oddities, and Wurlitzer theatre organs salvaged from regional cinema houses like Dillon’s Hartwig Theatre. The undisputed giant of the room is an 1880 Paris-built Gavioli military band organ spanning 27 feet wide, 12 feet high, and four feet deep. Before Bovey acquired it, the 90-key house-sized monstrosity spent years in a New York showroom and a Brooklyn warehouse before taking up permanent residence in an open-air Montana ghost town.

What makes the collection remarkable isn't just that these Victorian-era leviathans survived—it's that they still play. You don't just stand behind a velvet rope looking at polished mahogany; you drop pocket change directly into coin slots to trigger pneumatic bellows, paper rolls, and folded cardboard books that force mechanical pipes, brass horns, and percussion into a deafening, uncanny blast of sound.