Musician: Peter Roebuck Pearsall (1790-1878)

Pearsall was born near Queens, New York in 1790. After the death of his mother, he was sent to a Moravian School in Pennsylvania, where he learned to play the organ and piano, eventually giving concerts and accompanying the church services. Upon graduation from high school, he returned to New York City, working as a bookkeeper and serving in the military during the War of 1812. After the war, he started a brokerage and commission business, making and losing a fortune.

Pearsall began to support his growing family by means of his musical abilities and knowledge. After teaching in Pennsylvania and Ohio, he and his family arrived in Indianapolis on May 1, 1847. The city’s first professional music teacher, in 1851 he founded the city’s first music school, The Academy of Music. He became, according to a contemporary account, “the father of instrumental music in Indiana.” His and the school students’ concerts were well received and journalist William Holloway called him “a musician pioneer of the city and the patriarch of home musicians.” He also found work as the church organist for Second Presbyterian and Christ Church on Monument Circle.

A special concert to mark his 30 years of serving to the citizens of Indianapolis took place at the Grand Opera House here in 1878. When he died, the Indianapolis Journal noted, “In his death the city has lost one to whom she is indebted most to her present prominence in musical taste and culture, his pupils have lost a beloved teacher and father, and everybody has lost a friend.”