Musical Instruments - P.T. Barnum Digital Collection

Musical instruments in the collection of the Barnum Museum include two associated with well-known women of the 19th-century: Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, aka “The Swedish Nightingale,” and Nancy Fish Barnum, the second wife of showman P. T. Barnum. These two instruments, a piano and a banjo, reveal the changing forms of instruments in the 19th-century, and provide insights on how valued music was to home entertainment prior to the inventions of the phonograph and the radio.