Original American Kazoo Company Museum & Factory

The story

The metal kazoo reached Eden by way of a traveling salesman. Around 1912 Emil Sorg brought the idea to Western New York and found Michael McIntyre, a Buffalo tool-and-die maker; McIntyre found Harry Richardson, who ran a South Main Street metal-forming plant that had been stamping sheet metal since 1907. The two were producing metal kazoos by late 1915; the Original American Kazoo Company followed in 1916, and McIntyre patented his version in 1923. The company's own origin story reaches back to an Alabama Vest of Macon, Georgia, who supposedly had the instrument built to his specifications in the 1840s — a tale with better legs than paperwork.

The reason to drive down is the machinery. The die presses are the ones installed in 1907, and more than twenty machines still run off a single ten-horsepower motor through overhead jackshafts and leather belts, a power-transmission scheme that was obsolete before the Depression and is now most of the point. Kazoos are made here the same way they were in late 1915. By 1994 the plant was turning out 1.5 million a year, and it remains the only metal kazoo factory in North America. The World's Largest Metal Kazoo sits on the roof, a claim nobody contests.

Ownership has changed hands more often than the product has. Samuel Whetzle took over in 1939; Brimms Inc., run by Robert and David Berghash, bought the company in 1985; in 2003 the museum passed to the Claddagh Foundation, and in the fall of 2005 Claddagh handed the museum to Suburban Adult Services, which still presses kazoos on the original machines, and sold the gift shop to two longtime Eden residents. That shop now trades as Kazoo Boutique. The cases hold wooden kazoos, gold- and silver-plated ones, and kazoos shaped like liquor bottles, pressed to mark the end of Prohibition.