Walk into North Canaan’s historic railroad station, and you’ll see hundreds of accordions stacked floor to ceiling. It’s a wall of gleaming buttons, piano keys, mother-of-pearl, rhinestones, and chrome.
That’s where you’ll find Paul Ramunni.
He’s curator and owner of the New England Accordion Connection and Museum Company, a space devoted not just to instruments, but to the stories they carry.
Ramunni didn’t always feel so connected to the accordion. Growing up on Long Island, he says his mother pushed him to learn when he was 13 — a decision he resisted.
“I said to my mother, ‘Anything but that, Mom,’” he recalled.
Long dismissed as “corny” because of its ties to polka music, the accordion has often been the butt of jokes. Ramunni played through his teenage years, but stopped when he went to college. Then, decades later, something unexpected brought him back.
“Forty-two years later … I woke up in Vermont and had the urge to play again,” he said.
A single phone call led him to a nearby seller with a collection of accordions — and concertinas said to have come from Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp.
“That was the moment that changed things for me,” Ramunni said.
At the time, he was working as an accountant. But collecting instruments soon became something more.
“I thought I was collecting accordions,” he said. “And then I realized I was saving the stories.”
‘The courage of people’
Many of those stories are rooted in war, migration and survival.
One begins in Nazi Germany, with a young accordion prodigy named Rosemarie Molitor. According to Ramunni, she was asked to perform at Nazi dinner parties. She refused.
As punishment, her father was forced to drive trucks loaded with explosives to the front lines. But the family survived the war.
Years later, relatives brought Molitor’s accordions to Ramunni’s museum. He asked when Molitor died, and was surprised by the answer.
“She hasn’t passed,” they told him.
Molitor, who was in her 90s and living in California, spoke with Ramunni over FaceTime.
“All of a sudden, this woman kicks into overdrive — ‘Hitler wanted me to play… it was a terrible, terrible time,’” he said. “The courage of people — and it involved an accordion.”
Other instruments in the collection carry their own histories: One was used to entertain Al Capone in the 1930s, another belonged to television host Lawrence Welk, and one was played for more than 225,000 troops during World War II.
Bringing people together
But the museum isn’t just about the past.
The accordion still has the power to connect people, Ramunni says.
He remembers two orchestral musicians who stopped by while in the area for another event. Neither had ever played the instrument. One was a bassoonist, the other a clarinetist.
Ramunni brought them into a back room and handed them an accordion. Within minutes, he said, they were laughing like children — giggling, playing, completely absorbed.
Afterward, he asked where they were from. One was from Iran. The other, Israel.
The musician from Iran told him they had only met a week earlier.
“A bond developed over the music,” the bassoonist told Ramunni. “And we agreed we would never let anything come between us that would hurt that bond or destroy it.”
For Ramunni, that moment captured what the accordion represents: Not just that it can make music, but that music brings people together.
That sense of discovery played out again that day when a man driving through town with his family spotted the sign for the museum and pulled in.
“I don’t know how to play one — I think they’re cool, though,” said Alex Beardsley of Prospect. “I thought it was a store … I didn’t realize it was a whole museum. This is really cool.”
Nearby, Ramunni showed a 5-year-old boy how the instrument works, opening the bellows as spirited music filled the room.
The sound rose and fell, lifting into something playful and alive.
On the back of his business card, Ramunni sums up accordions this way:
“They each have their own special voice, characteristics, flaws, and beauty. I guess in a way the same could be said of each of us.”
