In 1970 the descendants of Walter Dignam (1826–91) debated what to do with his extensive collection of music and remembrances from his days as a prominent musician in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester, New Hampshire. Two of his granddaughters, rejecting the proposal that it should all be thrown out, decided to donate the materials to the Manchester Historic Association. This simple familial desire to preserve the artifacts of a noted ancestor resulted in the preservation of one the most significant collections of American popular instrumental music from that era. Dignam, who served as music teacher, music director at the local Catholic church, and leader of a quadrille orchestra, is now best known for leading the Manchester Cornet Band prior to and during the Civil War. The Dignam Collection preserves a significant amount of the music that he purchased, arranged, and composed in all these roles. Most notably, it includes the repertoire of a remarkable military-style New England brass band of the 1850s, which features the only extant examples of certain compositions by some of the most celebrated brass band composer-arrangers of the 1840s–50s.

Two of the brass band part book sets in the Dignam Collection are known to scholars and performers. They are mentioned frequently in books and dissertations about Civil War–era brass bands and have been microfilmed and digitized by the Library of Congress. Period-instrument brass bands have transcribed, performed, and recorded selections from the repertoire. While existing scholarship focuses primarily on the men who played from these books, no substantive discussion of the books themselves or the actual music contained within exists beyond indexing. An examination of the physical objects and the musical contents offers an opportunity to learn more about the popular musical tastes of American musicians and audiences in New England between the years 1852–60. Although the choices of items were predicated on availability and preferences of the bandleader, those choices include contemporary music that was fashionable in the concert hall, ballrooms, opera stage, and piano music stands in 1850s America. This study will offer an overview of the contents of the two Manchester Cornet Band part book sets dating to the decade of the 1850s, with an assessment of the popularity of the musical genres, titles, and composers based on their number and distribution in the sources.