Knute Reindahl, Violin Maker 
By Fred L. Holmes 
The chance remark of a friend that violins could be made most 
cheaply in a factory, but that it required a small shop to produce a 
Stradivarius, led Knute Reindahl to desert the carpenter’s bench and 
enter a field in which he has now become one of the most famous violin 
makers of the world. When Mr. Rein¬ 
dahl as a boy in 1871 came to this coun- 
trv from Norway, he noted the skill 
with which the Indians fashioned their 
bows and arrows. Imitating them he 
made many such weapons and succeeded 
in selling them. Knute’s father became 
a prosperous farmer in the Middle West, 
but the boy had no taste for farming. 
He would spend his time in carving and 
whittling and finally, one winter, was 
engaged to teach school. 
By the advice of Julius E. Olson, 
now professor of Scandinavian lan¬ 
guages at the University of Wisconsin, 
he abandoned both farming and teach¬ 
ing to follow his native bent and work 
in wood. At first he secured a job in a 
wagon factory, but carried on his wood 
carving on the side. By the time he was 
thirty years old, he had saved enough to go back to Norway. There 
he spent five years studying wood craft, and when he returned to 
America he was equipped for a job more to his liking than that of the 
wagon factory. He obtained work at the Pullman shops in Chicago 
and did so well that he was offered a position as superintendent of the 
wood carving atelier, but his ambitions lay along other lines. He 
loved the music of stringed instruments and longed to create master 
violins. So with his years of experience in wood carving to help him, 
he embarked on that which was to be his life career. 
Mr. Reindahl works without any manual assistant, and the violins 
that come from his hand are entirely of his own workmanship. He 
himself attributes their remarkable quality largely to the wood from 
which they are made. The tops are generally fashioned of old and 
seasoned pine which for the most part he has imported from Norway. 
It is obtained from old buildings, the timber for which has been felled 
perhaps before Columbus sailed for America and has been drying for 
six or seven hundred years. The bottom sides of his instruments he 
