From dulcimer kits to harps.

Stoney End began as something else. In 1968 Lendrum “Len” MacEachron, a former patent attorney, and Su MacEachron founded Here Inc. in Minneapolis, selling dulcimers and kits, according to the company’s history. Len’s motto, the firm says, was “Music can save the world.”

In 1984 the cabinetmaker Gary Stone and Eve Stone bought the business and moved it to a converted 1920s dairy barn outside Red Wing, Minnesota. Gary found “a stray set of harp plans Len had tucked away among the dulcimer patterns,” the company says, and harps became the business. Eve named it Stoney End — from the family surname and the dead-end road they lived on.

In 2025, after more than forty years in Red Wing, the Stones retired, and Grady and Nikki O’Gorman became the owners, with Gary staying on as “Master Harp Builder.” The website now uses the name Stoney End Music.

Seven thousand harps, by its count.

Stoney End describes itself as a “family-owned and operated designer, maker, and seller of traditional folk lever harps.” It says it has designed seventeen original models and hand-built more than seven thousand lever harps; those are its figures. Its range runs from 16-string lap harps to 34-string floor harps, and the 22-string Brittany lap harp is, it says, a favourite.

The harps are made in Red Wing. Minnesota Public Radio visited the workshop in 2011 for a report on how the harps are made.

The ownership story is the brand’s spine: a dulcimer business founded by a patent lawyer, renamed by a cabinetmaker’s family, and handed in 2025 to a new couple, with the master builder still at the bench.

Levers, clarsachs and a national harp.

The lever harp has deep roots in Britain and Ireland. Wales’s official tourism site says “The Welsh harp (also known as the triple harp) is widely considered to be the national instrument of Wales.” In Scotland, the Clarsach Society says it was “Established in 1931 at the close of the National Mòd in Dingwall,” with a founding principle “to advance the clarsach and its music,” and describes itself as “Promoting the playing of the Scottish lever harp.”

The lever is the defining part. The Clarsach Society explains that early harps used “semitone blades… screwed into the neck of the harp, one beside each string,” later replaced by “excellent, accurate levers” — hence “The lever harp, as it is commonly called.” Each lever raises one string by a semitone; a concert pedal harp instead uses pedals that change every string of a given note at once.

The lever harp’s other ancestor is the Irish harp. Ireland’s government says it has “the distinction of being the only nation to have a musical instrument as a national emblem,” a gold harp with silver strings on blue, modelled on a fourteenth-century harp at Trinity College Dublin. Guinness says it registered its own harp as a trademark in 1876, and that this is why the two harps face opposite ways.

The pedal harp’s mechanism goes back to one patent. Sébastien Erard applied for an English patent, number 3332, in 1810, for a double-action harp in which each string has two forks worked by a pedal, so it can sound flat, natural or sharp; a Royal College of Music thesis by Fanny Guillaume-Castel says the design “remains the standard pedal harp mechanism today,” and that Erard sold about a hundred in 1812, the first full year of sale.

The lever itself is often French. The Mouzeil maker Camac, founded in 1972 by the brothers Gérard and Joël Garnier, supplies levers to other builders: Oregon’s Thormahlen says its harps are “all fully levered with Camac levers,” and California’s Triplett says “Our sharpening levers are manufactured in France by Camac harps.”

Other American lever-harp families have taken different paths: Rees Harps moved from California to an 1881 building in Rising Sun, Indiana, in 2000 and registered the Harpsicle trademark, and Chicago’s Venus stopped building new production harps in 2018.

Timber law touches every harp maker. In 2017 the CITES convention brought the whole rosewood genus, Dalbergia, under its Appendix II controls; since 26 November 2019 it has exempted “finished musical instruments, finished musical instrument parts and finished musical instrument accessories,” though Brazilian rosewood stays in Appendix I. We found no source linking any maker in this round to those timbers.

Erard’s own 1811 advertisement promised that the strings produced “three distinct tones instead of two,” so that the player “can now play in every known key.” Guinness’s archive says the harp “has been synonymous with Guinness since 1862 when it was used as a symbol on the first bottle label,” and Ireland’s patent office says the state harp is excluded “from registration or use as trade marks.”

At the top of the market sit the pedal-harp makers. Chicago’s Lyon & Healy, harpmakers since 1889, has belonged since 1987 to the group founded by Victor Salvi, whose Italian factory is in Piasco, Piedmont; the New York Times described the result as “a genial global monopoly.”

Stoney End’s model range — from 16-string lap harps to 34-string floor harps — spans small lap harps and full floor harps, and its 22-string Brittany lap harp, it says, is a favourite with its customers.

A surname and a dead-end road.

Stoney End’s name is a small piece of family wit — the Stones, at the end of a road — and it has outlived the family’s ownership. The barn, the town and the founder’s motto complete the identity. Its story runs from a patent lawyer’s dulcimer kits in 1968 to a new young owning couple in 2025, with the same builder at the bench through four decades of it.

For a design guide, Stoney End shows a name chosen by one family carried forward by another, with the craftsman kept on to bridge the change. Compare Blevins, a Colorado maker whose name was put up for sale when it closed, and Thormahlen, still run by its founding couple.

For this guide we use a barn red and a cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No harp or mark is reproduced.

Keep Stoney End’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.