I usually consider it bad form to be the only person to respond to my own post, but.... #I have learned some information about Dayton Mandolins and thought it might be worth posting it here in the event someone ever searches this topic...
A short description of these mandolins do, in fact, appear on P. 99 of Gruhn's
Acoustic Guitars and Other Fretted Instruments... #I'm told it shows the "double boiler" construction of the sound chamber... #I'm going to buy a copy of the book now!
A MC member (thanks gb) turned me on to Phil Case. #He and Ann are an old time music duet out of Ohio, and he records with Dayton Mandolins, among other cool vintage instruments. #Here is their very nice website and there are some pictures of Phil's Dayton mandolins on it: #
http://www.wso.net/dryrun/
Anyway, Phil has researched the Dayton Mandolin Company, and here is his response to my query (shared here with his permission):
"Thanks for contacting us. Here's what I can tell you about Dayton mandolins. According to a Xerox copy I have of their catalog, Style A mandolins supposedly have a spruce top and a birch back. The more upscale Style B has the mahogany back. Their choice of building materials probably fluctuated with supply. The catalog contains a lot of shaky spelling and grammar which would indicate that Charles B. Rauch, the
proprietor, spent more time working than he did in school. But certainly you're aware of the feature that makes Dayton mandolins unique: that sound board that bisects the body like an double boiler, dividing the sound chamber into two sections. This was Charles B. Rauch's feature for which he got his patent in 1911. He thought it would revolutionize
acoustic design, although it never really did.
# # Rauch had a small shop at 143 Apple Street in Dayton, Ohio from 1911 until around 1940. He and a few assistants made mandolins, banjos, a few guitars, and related instruments. For as long as they were around here and as many of their instruments still turn up, no one here knows too much about their production output figures or extent of distribution. The whole block where the shop building once stood is now a parking garage for a hospital. I know all this because I live in the Dayton area.
# # So far I've not been able to determine what serial numbers belong to what year. I don't know if the numbers just run consecutively or were set off differently for different instruments. My oldest one is serial #138 and I don't know if they started with 001 or 100. Either way, that one's got to be among the older examples. The inlay "The Dayton" doesn't
seem to appear on the mandolin pegheads until the serial numbers approach four digits, but it appears on all banjo pegheads, early and later. The pegheads bearing the Dayton name are more "snakehead"-shaped, which leads me to believe that they came into being in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Mr. Rauch might have been following the Gibson trend. Dayton mandolin pegheads prior to this were paddle-shaped like their Gibson counterparts.
# # There were three grades of mandolins offered: Style A, Style B, and the Student Special, which had a completely round body and looked like a huge Oreo with a fretboard. Style B was actually the top-of-the-line, more ornate mandolin (why not style A--who knows?). My Style B is serial
#1134 (almost 1,000 instruments after my Style A?). There have been some odd models over the years, too, like "The Dayton Heart", a heart-shaped mandolin. I have one of these and it wasn't made with the sound board and was given no serial number on the sticker. I saw an ad once in Vintage Guitar Magazine for a "Dayton Heart" tenor guitar. That has to be bizarre. You have an example of the work of a somewhat obscure, wonderfully weird, small Midwestern maker from the early 20th century. "
Interestingly, my Dayton Mandolin has a serial number of 384 and, although the label says A style, it has some of the inlay and binding of Phil's B style, but with the birch back and body shape of the A style, which probably indicates a later construction and usinig whatever was around the shop!
This mandolin has a real nice tone... #its quite loud, open and resonant... #I'd love to hear from any other Dayton Mandolin owners, and I bet so would Phil.
Bob
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