Organ Projects

Allison Alcorn

Allison A. Alcorn received her PhD from the University of North Texas, Denton, in 1997 and is now professor of musicology at Illinois State University, where she is active in the Honors Program, Study Abroad, and Faculty Development and mentoring. Alcorn served as editor of the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society from 2012–2017 and joined the AMIS Board of Governors in 2017. She has previously been councilor for research for the Organ Historical Society and on the governing board of the American Organ Archives. Publications include articles for the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments as well as articles in a variety of national and international journals.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this article was published in the February issue of The Diapason, pages 22–24.

 

Hinners & Albertsen in Red Wing, Minnesota

The Red Wing organ’s specification list represents the standard style 2/10, available in style A, B, or C; that is, in the mail order, the congregation indicated whether it should be built to go on the left, center, or right of the altar. This was a substantial investment for the church at just less than $1,000.00. Clearly, this organ (Figure 10) is nothing elaborate or extravagant. It is a meat and potatoes organ. No dessert here, no fancy garnishes, only what is absolutely needed:

GREAT

8′ Open Diapason (metal, 61 pipes)

8′ Melodia (wood, 61 pipes)

8′ Dulciana (metal, 49 pipes)

4′ Principal (metal, 61 pipes)

SWELL

16′ Bourdon (wood, 49 pipes)

8′ Violin Diapason (metal, 61 pipes)

8′ Lieblich Gedackt (wood, 61 pipes)

8′ Salicional (metal, 49 pipes)

4′ Flauto Traverso (metal, 61 pipes)

PEDAL

16′ Bourdon (wood, 27 pipes)

 

Couplers

Swell & Octave to Great Coupler

Swell to Great Coupler

Swell to Pedal Coupler

Great to Pedal Coupler

 

Accessories

Swell Tremulant

Blowers Signal

Wind Indicator

 

Pedal movements

Great Forte

Great Piano

Balanced Swell Pedal

 

Red Wing was originally the site of a Lakota farming village, and then in 1837 missionaries with the Evangelical Missionary Society of Lausanne began a decade of relatively sporadic missionary activity until several treaties were signed with the Sioux and Mendota in the 1850s and a U. S. Land Office opened in Red Wing in 1855. Within a few years, the town of Red Wing—named after the Lakota chief who used a dyed swan wing as a symbol of rank—became a busy river port. A more stable white settlement was established with the opening of a leather and shoe factory—the beginning of the famous Red Wing Shoe empire—and a pottery factory—the Red Wing Pottery empire—in the 1860s. However, it was the wheat trade that spurred rapid growth throughout the 1870s and then ironically also led to a serious economic downturn because of depleted soil and increased problems with blight and rust exacerbated by a series of severe storms.

Industrial diversification probably saved the town of around 4,000 inhabitants; flour mills opened along with lime quarrying and furniture building, lumber, and millwork. Red Wing Iron Works, founded in 1866, was perhaps the chief contributor that enabled the city to diversify and save itself. The iron works was owned and run by Benjamin and Daniel Densmore, Benjamin being the father of Frances Densmore, a true pioneer in American musicology and ethnomusicology.

Frances’s letters provide a good sense of what Red Wing was like in the era in which the Hinners & Albertsen organ came to the city. Frances wrote about having grown up going to bed at night listening to the drums and chanting of the Lakota on Trenton Island, directly across the Mississippi River from her house. She could see their fires from her bedroom window. In 1889 the Lakota were forced onto the Prairie Island Reservation, but they remained both a physical and aural presence in Red Wing.⁵

The Norwegian Lutheran Hauge Synod established a significant stronghold in Red Wing beginning in the 1870s and opened a seminary there in 1879, high on the bluff overlooking the city. The ladies seminary was opened in 1889 and was known especially for its Conservatory of Music and its director, Dr. Bernard F. Laukandt, who was also organist at St. Peter Norwegian Lutheran Church; therefore, the organist for the 1898 Hinners & Albertsen.⁶ The conservatory was divided into three departments: piano, voice, and pipe organ (the auditorium had a Kilgen organ) and ran a concert series that brought performers from the East coast. People would take the train from Minneapolis for the concerts, so despite the hardships of life in turn-of-the-century Red Wing, people also found a measure of cultured entertainment. The residents of Red Wing clearly appreciated music, so the climate was amenable to raising money for a good pipe organ. On the other hand, the reality was that Red Wing was rural and largely blue collar, and so while they sincerely appreciated the organ, a Möller or a Casavant was out of the question.

Red Wing’s organ was order number 360, placed August 6, 1898, by Carl N. Lien, secretary of St. Peter Norwegian Lutheran Church (Figure 11). It was to be shipped October 10 and dedicated October 23, 1898. As of December 7, however, it was still being hoped for, but for an unknown reason, it was not shipped until January 25, 1899.⁷ It weighed 5,690 pounds and was shipped on the Santa Fe Railroad at a cost of $34.14. The price of $1,050.00 was payable thirty days after delivery. The organ finally arrived about February 1, 1899, and was installed later that week, ready for the dedication concert the following weekend.

Tickets were sold for 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for children, a good indication that the organ had been purchased with a payment plan, which was typical for the company, and selling tickets for the dedication concert is a feature that appears in the histories for many of the Hinners organs. The concert featured Professor Rydning from St. Paul, a virtuoso organist and graduate of the Conservatory of Christiana, Norway. Professor Chally (from the seminary) and other participants in the concert were from Red Wing. The newspaper reported that the turnout was excellent, given how cold it was on that February night.⁸ Professor Rydning was active in the region from the 1890s through the early part of the twentieth century, appearing in newspaper concert program announcements with great frequency.

 

Characteristics of the organs

The stoplists, pipe scales, mouth shapes and cut-ups, and high wind pressures indicate that the Hinners company espoused a romantic tonal ideal. Further, small swell boxes jammed to the edges with pipes, and the packed interior mechanical set-up demonstrate that Hinners was committed to offering as much organ as possible for the limited amount of space available in small churches. The identical nature of measurements from one organ to the next strongly suggests mass-production techniques and certain stock models that could be altered for particular requirements. A number of features stand out as typical of the Hinners organs as represented by this 1898 instrument. First, draw knobs rather than tabs were standard until sometime in the 1920s. Second, early organs have a system of two pre-set mechanisms that were mechanical and could not be reset. One of the pre-sets combined all the loud ranks, while the other combined all the soft ranks. Economically minded construction is seen in details such as lower octave pipes built of wood rather than metal and lower octave pipes of one rank shared with at least one other rank. Some of the organs have a Quintotone in which the stopper doubles the pipe length, making it sound an octave lower without the cost of additional metal. Especially noteworthy because of its uniqueness among contemporary organ builders, Hinners & Albertsen normally avoided traditional reed ranks and instead included a labial reed stop in the Swell. Labial reeds hold pitch through temperature variations in addition to being less susceptible to dirt than a traditional reed pipe. Perhaps most important is that the labial reed, because it does not have an actual reed, was supremely practical for rural congregations without regular access to an organ technician.⁹

Pedalboards used native woods, the sharps stained somewhat darker than the naturals. The pedalboards were flat and short-compassed until the late 1920s, when the company made an effort to conform with the standards set forth by the American Guild of Organists and began building full concave, radiating pedalboards. The façade pipes were painted and stenciled until shortly after 1910, with muted color schemes designed to blend with the natural colors of the console wood. Many of the original pipe stencils (Figure 12) do not offer shining examples of stellar stenciling work. For the most part, the Hinners factory workers were German immigrants with backgrounds in furniture building, not painting, and the stenciling is frequently sloppy in places. Generally, the factory employees took great pride in their work and believed their instruments were giving voice to their own thoughts and feelings, sometimes rather metaphysically. For example, when the Rutz Organ Company rebuilt a 1918 Hinners for Holy Nativity Evangelical Lutheran Church in New Hope, Minnesota, they found a penciled inscription inside the Great chest on the valve spring board: “Peace Proposal of Austria to USA rejected. To Hell with the war Lords. Dade Johnson and F. C. Muehlenbrink 9/18/18.”¹⁰

Nicking of pipe mouths is heavy in all Hinners organs. Metal pipes are nicked on the languid and wooden pipes are nicked in the windway. Hinners used three tuning methods: stoppers, scrolls, and key-hole tuners. Any sleeves found on these instruments were added after the scroll broke. 

The manual keyboards are constructed with ivory slips on the naturals and ebony sharps. Pedal ranks and façade pipes often use a tubular pneumatic winding action while the key action is mechanical throughout.¹¹ Even as regards winding, though, unreliable electricity in rural areas kept Hinners using pump handles for quite awhile after most builders had switched to electric blower systems. Despite eventually having electric blowers, most organs still retained the capability for manual pumping precisely because of that unreliable electricity. Typical Hinners console design is quarter-sawn oak with a dark stain, decorated with raised panels and carved finials and moldings characteristic of early twentieth-century furniture styles. Grillework is sometimes integrated with façade pipes.

 

Continuing History of the Red Wing Hinners & Albertsen

The 1928 photograph in Figure 13 is the only extant image of the 1898 Red Wing Hinners & Albertsen while it belonged to St. Peter’s. Professor Laukandt is seated at the organ. In 1930—two years after this photo—the two Norwegian Lutheran churches in Red Wing merged, taking Trinity Lutheran’s name and building. The St. Peter building was sold to the Christian Science Church in 1933. At some point the Christian Scientists decided to update the sanctuary. This has virtually never been good news for organs—and the 1898 Hinners & Albertsen was moved to the center of the front platform with small side rooms built to its left and right. The console was whitewashed (Figure 14) and the façade pipes were painted gold (Figure 15), but the working parts remained untouched. It was rather untidy, but it was all there, and the paint-just-the-visible-front job on the pipes allowed for later restoration to the original color scheme. That the church members were able to uninstall and reinstall even a ten-rank pipe organ seems to be a testament to the basic mechanical sense used by Hinners and to the general battleship quality of these little organs. This is one of the precise things that made Hinners so successful in the small rural church market—anyone with fundamental mechanical sense could care for the organ; it was sturdy enough to stand up to the rigors of rural life. The 1926 Hinners at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Dimock, South Dakota, went through the Dust Bowl, had not been cleaned in about 60 years, and still sounded beautiful through two inches of solidified dust.

In the mid-1980s, the former St. Peter Church building was purchased by the Apostolic Face Lighthouse Church, and in August 1995 by the Four Square Church. By 1996 the pastor confirmed to me they were about to “throw [the organ] away.” I contacted Tom Erickson, a Casavant representative who lived in Red Wing. Erickson took up the cause. For the next year, Erickson was tireless in attending Kiwanis meetings, Rotary meetings, Lions, city council, and chamber of commerce—any group that would listen to the organ’s story and might agree to help. He first made headway when he raised enough money to purchase the instrument, for by now, the church had become quite convinced of its treasure, and while they would certainly not harm the instrument, they could be convinced to sell it. Next, Erickson persuaded the owners of the historic St. James Hotel to let him store the organ in the hotel’s recently acquired Red Wing Iron Works building that was, at that point, sitting empty while they decided what to do with it. Erickson kept raising money, and the keydesk was sent to Luhm’s Refinishing, a Minneapolis firm that specializes in historic furniture and pianos. A local artist, Delores Fritz, re-stenciled the pipes. In the meantime, the owner of the St. James Hotel agreed to give the organ a home in its lobby and accept the responsibility for its care. It now has become part of the identity of the hotel—“you know, the historic hotel in Minnesota with a pipe organ in the lobby”—so much so that the organ even appears on the hotel’s Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Hotel_(Red_Wing,_Minnesota)), in its TripAdvisor photos and reviews, and ubiquitously on Instagram with the stjameshotel location tag.

The St. James built a small balcony and fashioned a window into a door in order to access the organ for servicing (Figure 16). A ladder is required to climb into the balcony off the exterior stairs, and then the door opens straight into the organ. To get into the swell box, the side façade pipes have to be removed, but that is not unusual for a Hinners. The very compactness and space efficiency that made Hinners organs so attractive to small congregations without much square footage in the sanctuary conversely also made the organs into real maintenance challenges as far as simply accessing its various components. They are intuitive constructions to the mechanically minded, to be sure, but one must first somehow reach the part in need of attention.

As with any organ’s story, this instrument has had to accept compromises along the way in order to continue serving the needs of its changing audiences. Most significantly, the corner façade pipes had to be lowered by about a foot to fit it in the space, and the rear six side façade pipes had to be left off entirely. The Hinners & Albertsen organ is used regularly. Hotel guests may request the blower key between the hours of 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.; as one might guess, the historic St. James Hotel does a brisk wedding business, and the organ is a frequent participant. The hotel staff works hard to keep it safe, and current management seems cognizant of its historic value. The St. Peter Norwegian Lutheran Church building has taken on a new life in recent years as well, now serving as The Red Wing Church House (https://www.redwingchurchhouse.com), a luxury vacation rental that rents for about $2,500 a week (Figure 17).

 

Nuts and Bolts

The Hinners & Albertsen organ company was, even in its time, sometimes dismissed as being the producer of inferior instruments, as was the Hinners Organ Company for decades after it. Gradually, and sometimes with a bit of sentimental nostalgia for the instruments on which so many organists cut their teeth, the organ world began to realize that the organs are not inferior at all, but that they represent a “nuts and bolts” type of organ. Hinners & Albertsen organs offered churches a perfectly serviceable and respectable musical alternative to the reed organ that would fulfill the needs and meet the budget of a small congregation without the nice but unnecessary expense of a large number of ranks on an organ that was individually designed for each particular church.

Other companies built stock organs, to be sure, and other companies used a catalog approach to sales. Lyon & Healy, Kimball, Felgemaker, Estey, and Wangerin-Weickhardt all had a similar product line and methodology—particularly Felgemaker with the Patent Portable Organ. On the other hand, certainly for Hinners & Albertsen, operations were focused nearly exclusively in the realm of the small stock organ. The vast majority of all Hinners instruments were organs of about ten ranks—the largest Hinners organ ever built had only twenty-eight ranks. Moreover, Hinners built these small pipe organs for nearly 50 years, long after the other companies had followed the trend to larger organs with strictly electric actions. Hinners & Albertsen organs, and ultimately the Hinners Organ Company, supplied a unique need in American society that arose from circumstances peculiar to the American situation. The frontier was closed and settlements were progressing beyond concern for mere survival to concerns for improving their quality of life. Raised in small mission churches around the rural Midwest, John L. Hinners felt the people’s desire for a pipe organ and understood their frustration with the expense and complexity of the instrument that made it impractical for small country churches. In a creative combination of business methods and comprehension of musical and construction issues, the Hinners & Albertsen Organ Company brought pipe organs to rural America and, in the case of the Red Wing, Minnesota, organ, filled the bluffs of the Mississippi River with music.

 

Notes

5. Frances played organ, and for many years she was a church organist at the Red Wing Episcopal church. It seems a safe assumption that Frances would at least have known this Hinners & Albertsen organ, likely heard it, and possibly even played it.

6. The school’s students included girls who wanted to marry ministers, but also “status offenders,” that is, girls who had committed no crime but had become impossible to control.

7. This is an excessively delayed schedule, even for a business at the time. Hinners typically turned around its orders well within three months, with some organs shipping within a matter of a few weeks.

8. Sadly, weather data for Red Wing is recorded only as far back as 1902.

9. Allison Alcorn, “A History of the Hinners Organ Company of Pekin, Illinois,” The Tracker, vol. 44, no. 3 (2000), 17.

10. This organ was built for Church of the Sacred Heart, Spring Valley, Illinois, and was moved to Minnesota in 1990.

11. One of Hinners’s distinctive characteristics is how late the company relied on tracker actions. Even in its few theater contracts, Hinners remained loyal to tracker action and was probably the last builder to give up theater trackers, with two installed as late as 1916.

Michael McNeil

Michael McNeil has designed, constructed, and researched pipe organs since 1973. He was also a research engineer in the disk drive industry with 27 patents. He has authored four hardbound books, among them The Sound of Pipe Organs, several e-publications, and many journal articles.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this article was published in the August 2018 issue of The Diapason, pages 16–20.

 

The casework in pictures

The entire casework of Opus 161 is executed in solid black walnut, and in the author’s opinion is among the best of Johnson’s cases with its elegant proportions and understated Gothic ornamentation. The window above the entrance of Eastside Presbyterian Church, its original home, displayed similar, restrained Gothic form and ornamentation. Elsworth’s book illustrates a great many of Johnson’s organs, among them Opus 134, built in 1862 for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Lanesborough, Massachusetts.¹⁷ Opus 134 has nearly identical stiles and ornamentation, but its proportions do not soar in the elegant manner of Opus 161, perhaps the result of limitations in height. It is ironic that one of Johnson’s best aesthetic creations has languished in anonymity for decades. Many American churches built in the early nineteenth century did not have a provision for a pipe organ, and as a consequence Elsworth noted that most of Johnson’s earlier organs were furnished with sides to the cases of the free-standing organs produced for such churches.¹⁸ As previously noted, Opus 161 originally had such side panels to its casework, and these were found crudely sawn and nailed behind the façade. The Piru church elected to place the façade casework flush with the wall of the church, necessitating the removal of the side panels.

As was typical of nearly all nineteenth century organs, the façade contains no smaller pipes. The side flats contain pipes of the Open Diapason with considerable overlengths. This is the only architectural flaw in this otherwise stunningly designed case. The use of pipes of very different lengths is an important architectural device—it gives a sense of scale, making the larger pipes appear more imposing in contrast. But façades with pipes of extremely different size are more complex and more expensive to make. Compared to the vast majority of nineteenth-century façades, Opus 161 is one of the finest aesthetic designs.

 

The keydesk in pictures

The reader should refer to Part 1 of this series for photographs of the keydesk and stop jambs (August 2018, pages 17–18). Elsworth described the keydesks of Johnson organs from the period of Opus 43, 1855, to Opus 268, 1868:

 

The manual compass was invariably fifty-six notes, from CC to G3. The stop knobs were disposed in vertical rows on each side of the manual keyboards, and always had square shanks with round knobs that had flat faces. Into these faces were set the ivory labels with the stop names. The labels were always engraved in Spencerian script with no pitch indication. The nameplates up to about 1867 or 1868 were of silver, engraved “Wm. A. Johnson, Westfield, Mass.”¹⁹

 

This description provides some evidence that the organ was modified during its installation at Piru. The stop action does indeed have square shanks leading to the bellcranks, but the shafts connecting to the square shanks and leading through the stop jambs are round. The author had initially believed that the stop jambs were original, observing well-worn and professionally installed felt bushings in the openings of the stop jambs. But a more likely explanation is that the round shafts and extant jambs were added at a later date, and this goes a long way to explain the disappearance of the split bass stops, all of which were screwed together to make continuous stops with no splits. And this nicely explains the current specification with 20 controls instead of the 22 controls indicated in the opus list of the Johnson factory.

The organ was initially supplied with a hook-down Swell shoe, normal fare for Johnson’s work of this time. This feature was deleted, and a balanced Swell shoe was installed by crudely re-routing the action of the Great to Pedal coupler rollerboard. Note the added Swell pedal in Figure 7, the missing hook-down pedal in Figure 8, and the damage to the action in Figure 9 and Figure 10. All of this damage was repaired in the 1976 restoration and the original hook-down mechanism refabricated. The figures show the condition of the console prior to the restoration.

 

The key action in pictures

The basic layout of the key action can be seen in Figure 6 in Part 1 of this series (August 2018, page 20). With the exception of the repositioning of the Swell chest and the addition of the balanced Swell pedal, the key and stop action of Opus 161 was well worn but virtually unaltered in 1976. The damage to the trackers on the Pedal couplers from the installation of the balanced Swell pedal was repaired in 1976 with new trackers, wires, felts, and buttons, and basic repairs to the stickers on the Swell to Great coupler were made, but this was a stopgap solution. At this time the console was in need of a complete disassembly and refurbishment of the leather on the couplers, the felts, and the leather buttons. The action was well designed, had served for a period of more than a hundred years, and had survived a move from Stockton to Piru. But the leather facings of the key tails where the coupler stickers made contact and the felts and leather buttons were showing their age. There were no funds for such work in 1976. 

In Johnson’s action we see similarities to Samuel Green. Bicknell writes: 

 

Green introduced or developed numerous refinements to the mechanism. He often arranged pipes from f# up in chromatic order on the soundboards, even in large organs. This reduced the extent to which rollerboards were required. . . . To make the key action readily adjustable the ends of the trackers were fitted with tapped wires and leather buttons. The appearance of Green’s consoles was enhanced by the use of ivory inserts screwed into the heads of the stop knobs, engraved with the name of the stop. . . . Green also usually made keyboards with white naturals and black sharps. . . .²⁰

 

All of these features are found on Opus 161. The photographs of the action were all taken in 1976 prior to the restoration work.

 

The stop action in pictures

The stop action of Opus 161 is conventional, with metal squares and square wooden shanks. The stop action to the Pedal 16′ Double Open Diapason is a ventil valve to the three windchests of that stop, which are placed at the sides (largest pipes, diatonic) and the treble pipes at the back (chromatic). The photographs show the details of the stop action construction.

A description of the stops and general notes on the scaling and voicing

This section provides a detailed description of the stops; two of the Swell stops were not measured (16′ Bourdon and 8′ Stopped Diapason). For the stops which were measured, a table of data in millimeters is shown. The photographs show some details of the construction, although the poor resolution of the camera is regrettable.

As earlier noted, there is a close resemblance between the organs of Samuel Green in late eighteenth century England and the organs of William A. Johnson in nineteenth-century America. Bicknell writes:

 

On the tonal side Green seems to have adopted the trend towards delicacy and developed it still further. . . . Green’s first line of development in securing the effect he desired was to experiment . . . with the scales of the chorus . . . . in 1778 the Open Diapason is larger than the rest of the chorus. . . . The appearance of extra pipes in some ranks, definitely by Green and contemporary with the instruments themselves, together with re-marking of the pipes, suggests that Green took spare pipes with him to the site and rescaled stops during the tonal finishing in the building. This is considerably removed from the standardised scaling and voicing adopted by, for example, Snetzler. The reasons for this become clearer when one understands that Green’s voicing broke new ground in other aspects as well. Delicacy was achieved partly by reduction of the size of the pipe foot and by increasing the amount of nicking. The loss of grandeur in the chorus was made up for by increasing the scales of the extreme basses. . . .²¹

As we will see in the graphical analysis of the data, all of the features mentioned by Bicknell about Samuel Green would apply equally well to Johnson’s Opus 161. Bicknell observes, “Where Snetzler provided a chorus of startling boldness and with all the open metal ranks of equal power, Green introduced refinement and delicacy and modified the power of the off-unison ranks to secure a new kind of blend.”²²

As earlier noted by Elsworth, Johnson’s wind pressure during the period of 1855 to 1868 “was generally between 21⁄2 and 23⁄4 inches (63 and 70 mm), and in rare examples, nearly 3 inches.”²³ The lower wind pressures, narrower scales of the upperwork, and reduced toes produced a sound with restrained brilliance. 

Referring to his conversations with Edwin B. Hedges (1872–1967), a voicer for Johnson organs, Elsworth made some telling observations. In the process of making the pipework, “ . . . the languids were carefully soldered in place, and the flues were properly adjusted.”²⁴ This is a very important comment, because today the flueway is considered a variable for adjusting power in some voicing styles, especially North Germanic voicing. Johnson’s flueways are very open, often the maximum that would produce good speech, even with Johnson’s bold nicking. Power balances, for Johnson as well as Green, were designed into the scales and further adjusted by the voicer at the toe. “The voicing of flue pipes, such as Diapason, Dulcianas, and strings, consists of nicking the languid, cutting up the upper lips to the proper mouth height, and adjusting the positions of the languid and the upper and lower lips. The amount of wind entering the pipe foot must be carefully adjusted by opening or closing the orifice in the pipe toe.”²⁵ There is no direct evidence that William A. Johnson had first-hand knowledge of the 1792 Samuel Green organ delivered to Boston, but the legacy of Green is obvious in Johnson’s work.

A few comments are in order on the nicking and languid treatment. The languids contain a counterface with a negative angle; the more usual angle is vertical, or 90 degrees. The Isnards made a positive-angled counterface at about 75 degrees with a normal bevel at about 45 to 55 degrees. The negative counterface of the Johnson languid is unusual. This languid is nicked at an angle with a knife, cutting a fine nick as deep as halfway into the languid bevel. Long knife cuts were also in evidence inside the lower lip. As a general rule there are the same number of nicks on a languid, regardless of pitch. These languids work well and produce fast speech even when the lower, negative languid bevel shows above the top edge of the lower lip; the upper lip is not pulled out to compensate for this languid position. Ears are generally found up to 1′ in pitch in the principal chorus, but they are very narrow, not extending far in front of the mouth.

Many of the pipes were found in 1976 to be crudely pinched at the top, part of an effort to reduce the pitch to the modern standard. All of this damage was repaired on mandrels, and tuning slides were fitted.

 

Great division

 

8′ Open Diapason 

This is the first stop on the front of the Great windchest. It has zinc resonators from low C to tenor B and planed common metal feet from about tenor E. All pipes from middle C are planed common metal (30% tin, 70% lead). Zinc wind conductors to the façade pipes supply copious wind; the conductor diameters are 38 mm at low C and 25 mm at tenor C. If memory serves, at least one or two of the pipes in the side flats were dummy pipes, implying that the speaking façade pipes extended to tenor D. The façade pipes were tuned with scrolls at the back, which were entirely rolled up as a consequence of the drop in pitch to 440 Hz, where the original pitch was probably closer to 450 Hz. See the earlier notes on the pitch and wind pressure. As with all of the stops in the principal chorus, the ears are very narrow. 

The author feels obligated to point out a grave error he made in the restoration by removing the heavy nicking on the languids of the Open Diapason, and only on this stop. To make the record clear, David Sedlak advised against doing this, and the author regrets that he did not take Sedlak’s advice. These nicks should be renewed in the manner used by Johnson.

8′ Keraulophon

The second stop on the chest, the Keraulophon pipes were found badly pinched at the top along with crudely reduced toe bores in an effort to reduce the pitch. All of the pipes were straightened on mandrels and tuning slides added. Toes that were not damaged were used as a guide for readjusting damaged toes. This stop is voiced with tuning slots and ears, but no beards of any kind. The bass octave is common with the Clarabella, five pipes from tenor C to E have zinc resonators, and the rest have planed common metal resonators. The nicking is bold and often crossed to keep the speech stable. Flueways were often more closed on one side. This is a bolder string than a Dulciana. 

 

8′ Clarabella

This is the third stop on the chest. Bass pipes C to tenor E are stopped wood; the remainder are open wood with lead plates covering the tops for tuning. These lead plates are somewhat closed down to accommodate the lowered pitch. The internal blocks forming the languids are lower than the front plates by 2.0 mm at tenor E, and 1.5 mm at tenor F. The bevel of the upper lip is internal for the open pipes and external for the stopped pipes. The stopped pipes have narrow, slanted strips at the sides of the mouth to form narrow ears; the open pipes have no extra strips functioning as ears. The nicking is deeper and heavier than the pipes of the principal chorus. The scales and voicing of this stop place its power on the same level as the principal chorus foundations. The only concession to power is a greatly reduced mouth width in the bass octave, a concession to its function as a common bass to the Keraulophon. 

The effective inside diameter of a wooden pipe is a calculation of its diagonal, a method proposed by Nolte.²⁶ The potential power of a round pipe is related to the amplitude of the standing wave in the pipe, which is in turn related to its diameter. Following this logic, Nolte has pointed out that the amplitude of a standing wave in a rectangular pipe is related to its widest point, i.e., its diagonal. We often see modern conversions of wood pipe scales by relating their rectangular areas to those of round metal pipes with equivalent areas, but this does not produce balanced power. The consequence is that conventional modern wisdom decrees that wood pipes should be scaled a few half tones narrower than round pipes of equivalent area. This disconnect disappears with Nolte’s observation of the relevance of the diagonal, not equivalent areas. This is not a new idea. Many older organs, e.g., J. A. Silbermann’s organ of 1746 at Marmoutier, show very disjointed scales between the rectangular wood bass of the 16′ Montre and its metal pipes when plotting by equivalent areas. Convert the Silbermann wood bass scales to diagonals and those scales merge seamlessly into the scales of the metal pipes. Diagonal computations of the effective diameters for the Johnson Clarabella can be found in the table, and those calculations are used in the graphical analysis. 

 

4′ Principal

The fourth stop on the chest, the Principal has five zinc resonators from C to E; the rest are all planed common metal. These pipes showed very little damage. The flueway depths are remarkably wide, especially in the treble, and demonstrate that Johnson regulated power entirely at the toe, not the flueway. Such flueway depths are often found in classical French voicing. This data set can be taken as reasonably accurate evidence of Johnson’s unmolested voicing.

 

4′ Flute И CheminОe

 The fifth stop on the chest from tenor C, this is a classically constructed flute in planed common metal with soldered domed tops, chimneys with no tuning mechanism, and very large ears for tuning. Those large ears had been pushed in far enough to virtually touch each other when found in 1976, another effort to reduce the pitch. The cutups were lightly arched. There was considerable handling damage to the flueways. The toes were reasonably intact. The reduction in pressure from 76 mm to 63 mm allowed these pipes to speak much more freely with the ears much more opened (but not completely straightened). The pipe construction becomes open at g#′′, i.e., the last twelve pipes, and they are noticeably wider across the break. The table above shows a calculation of the total resonator length, i.e., the body length plus the chimney, and the percentage of the chimney length to the total length. This gives an idea of the harmonics that Johnson was trying to emphasize with the chimney. At tenor C the chimney is 25% of the total length, emphasizing the fourth harmonic, while at middle C the chimney is 30% of the total length, roughly emphasizing the third harmonic. The chimney progresses to larger percentages of the total length as the pitch rises. The chimney is not a constant percentage of the total length.  The photograph shows the classical construction of this stop. 

 

22Џ3′ Twelfth

The sixth stop on the chest, this stop consists entirely of planed common metal pipes that had minimal damage.

 

2′ Fifteenth

The seventh and last flue stop on the chest, the 2′ Fifteenth continues the trend of extremely deep flueways and closed toes. The flueway depths of this stop are perhaps the largest the author has measured on any organ. Remarkably, this planed, common metal stop has no ears on any pipe, and its sound is exquisite. The toes are very restrained and represent the means of controlling power. The diameter and mouth width scales are considerably narrower than the Open Diapason, continuing the trend of narrower scaling with higher stop pitches, a characteristic introduced by Samuel Green. This progression can be clearly seen in the graphical analysis, in stark contrast to the Hook’s constant scaling of  the principal chorus. By this means Johnson and Green achieved a chorus with more refinement and less impact, but they compensated with very wide scaling of the extreme basses.

 

8′ Trumpet

The extant pipework of this eighth and last stop on the chest was constructed of planed common metal with zinc bottom sections from tenor C to tenor B. The Trumpet has an obscure history. In 1976 only two octaves of pipes were found from tenor C 13 to C 37. These were all in fairly good condition without obvious modifications; some crude slotting of the tops was repaired and the pipes spoke well on 63 mm wind. All of the original pipes were cut to exact length with no tuning slots or scrolls. The bass octave of the Trumpet was originally separated on the slider, but found screwed together in 1976. Interestingly, while the bass topboards were bored and chamfered to receive pipes, the chamfers were not burned in like all other borings on both windchests. With the repositioning of the Swell chest over the Great chest, it was now impossible to reconstruct a full-length bass set of pipes, and a half-length set was fabricated with limited tonal success (a few of the half-length pipes needed mitering to clear the Swell chest). The missing treble pipes were recreated by the firm of Stinkens to scales extrapolated from the original pipework. These were quite successful and a good tonal match. The high treble from c#′′′ to g′′′ were obviously flue pipes, and the rackboard borings provided guidance for their scales. All shallots are brass and are marked “H. T. Levi,” one of the reed voicers for William A. Johnson, according to both Barbara Owen²⁷ and Elsworth.²⁸ This stop bears a strong resemblance to the Trumpet heard in the recording of the Samuel Green organ at Armitage, Staffordshire, England (see the section on Recordings).

The Trumpet was carefully disassembled during the restoration and its measurements carefully tabulated; see the drawings and tables below. Measurements unfortunately omitted were the height of the block and the length and width at the top of the main taper on the tongues.

 

II Mixture

The author added a two-rank mixture in planed common metal to the Great during the 1976 restoration. While the merits of this can be debated, it was added in a manner that did not affect the other stops. A thick oak board was mounted at the back of the key channels, extending backwards and upwards, making this the ninth stop on the Great. The pipework was narrowly scaled in the manner of Johnson, roughly -7 half tones from 2⁄3′ pitch to 1⁄4′ pitch, then widening to about -3 half tones at 1⁄8′ pitch. A great many Johnson organs of this size had mixtures. It should be noted that Johnson mixtures of the time period during which Opus 161 was created were called Sesquialtera, and they included third-sounding ranks. Elsworth states, “ . . . these were composed of 17th, 19th, and 22nd ranks [i.e., 13⁄5′, 11⁄3′, and 1′, the same pitches observed in Samuel Green’s Sesquialteras] with two or three breaks.”²⁹ The mixture added by the author is more typical of later Johnson work in its composition without thirds.

The voicing of the cutups was a fortunate accident, where the pipes were mouth-voiced before realizing that they were left many half tones overlength by the pipemaker. When the cone-tuned pipes were cut to length, it was obvious that the cutups were very high. But this was fortuitous, because it taught the lesson that high cutups can have a superb blend, and this mixture provided a fine sparkling glitter in the plenum with no hint of harshness. There are no ears on any pipes. The toes are relatively more open than what Johnson would have done and the cutups are higher. The mixture composition is as follows:

 

C 2⁄3′ 1⁄2′

c 1′ 2⁄3′

c′ 11⁄3′ 1′

c′′ 2′ 11⁄3′

c′′′ 4′ 2′

 

Barbara Owen noted that William A. Johnson was hired to add a VII Cymbal to the Hook organ.³⁰ This mixture was installed in 1870, and no records indicate how this happened. The political implications invite much speculation, of course. The differences in scaling and voicing of the Johnson mixture relative to the Hook chorus illuminates the different approach to chorus design between Johnson and Hook. We will look at this in detail in the graphical analysis. The Johnson VII Cymbal provides a scintillating crown to the Hook chorus and contains a third-sounding rank. In 1871 William H. Johnson, the son of William A. Johnson, joined his father as a partner in the firm and the mixtures built from that time deleted the third-sounding rank.³¹ ν

Notes and Credits

All photos, drawings, tables, and illustrations are courtesy of the author’s collection if not otherwise noted. Most of the color photos were unfortunately taken by the author with an inferior camera in low resolution. David Sedlak used a high quality camera, lenses, and film to produce the high-resolution color photos of the church and its architectural details; these are all attributed to Sedlak.

17. The Johnson Organs, p. 50.

18. Ibid, p. 22.

19. Ibid, p. 23.

20. The History of the English Organ, p. 186.

21. The History of the English Organ, p. 185.

22. Ibid, p. 207.

23. The Johnson Organs, p. 25.

24. Ibid, p. 45.

25. Ibid, p. 47.

26. John M. Nolte, “Scaling Pipes in Wood,” ISO Journal, No. 36, December 2010, pp. 8–19.

27. Scot L. Huntington, Barbara Owen, Stephen L. Pinel, Martin R. Walsh. Johnson Organs 1844–1898, The Princeton Academy of the Arts, Culture, and Society, 2015, Cranbury, pp. 11, 13, 14, 16.

28. The Johnson Organs, p. 36.

29. Ibid, p. 48.

30. Johnson Organs 1844–1898, pp. 17-18.

31. The Johnson Organs, p. 48.

To be continued.

Stephen L. Pinel

Stephen L. Pinel holds two degrees from Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, and did further graduate work in historical musicology at New York University. A church musician for 45 years, he retired from full-time work during the fall of 2017. He held a Langley Fellowship at New York University, is a member of Pi Kappa Lambda Music Honor Society, an honorary member of the Organ Historical Society, and a past chair of the St. Wilfrid Club of New York City. He is also the author of several books and regularly contributes articles pertaining to American organ history both here and abroad.

The St. John’s Organ Society of Bangor, Maine, reached a noteworthy milepost this fall with its “silver” anniversary! The organization was established a quarter of a century ago to maintain, promote, and foster public interest in E. & G. G. Hook Opus 288 (1860), an illustrious, three-manual pipe organ in the back gallery of St. John’s Catholic Church. The society has sponsored a considerable number of cultural events surrounding this instrument, including concerts, symposia, and teaching institutes. The organ is a large, fully American Romantic organ, equal in grandeur to anything comparable in Europe, and is situated in a reverberant 1855 Gothic-revival building. The instrument has had work, especially in 1980 when it was restored by George Bozeman & Co., and more recently by Robert C. Newton and the Andover Organ Company. The society is directed by Kevin Birch, the organist and music director at St. John’s; Catherine Bruno, an advocate known for her infectious enthusiasm and organizational skills; and a loyal coterie of volunteers. The fact that this society has flourished through several pastoral changes at the church is in itself a noted accomplishment.

 

The Maine Historic Organ Institute

To celebrate this anniversary, the society sponsored the Maine Historic Organ Institute this fall between October 24 and 28. The institute featured concerts, lectures, masterclasses, and organ tours using St. John’s Hook and a number of historic instruments nearby. Most of those were built by the Hooks (or their successors), but we also saw an important 1849 instrument by George Stevens in First Parish Church, Belfast. What made the institute memorable was the diverse cross-section of the participants—organbuilders, performers, scholars, students, and five well-respected American teachers. The gathering provided an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas, hear and visit organs, interact, study, and consider the organ from a variety of contrasting but complimentary perspectives. A surprising guest among the registrants was the great American soprano, Phyllis Bryn-Julson, universally recognized for her iconic interpretation of atonal and twelve-tone music. Bryn-Julson happens to like organ music!

Central to the institute were a series of four evening performances by the teaching faculty: Kevin Birch, Margaret Harper, Christian Lane, Jonathan Moyer, and Dana Robinson. The repertoire varied, but one evening each was devoted to American, French, and German compositions, and the final evening was given dedicated to “Masterworks for the Organ.” The quality of the playing was impeccable, but a few of the highlights included Birch’s exquisite reading of “Andante sostenuto” from Symphonie Gothique, op. 70, of Charles-Marie Widor, and Harper’s elegant performance of “Vater unser im Himmelreich” (BWV 682) from the Clavierübung of Johann Sebastian Bach, surely one of the hardest pieces in the repertoire. To my ears, the performance honors went to the remarkable Dana Robinson from the University of Illinois at Champaign. His  performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 1 in F, op. 65, no. 1, and the Choral in E Major by César Franck were among the finest interpretations of those works I recall hearing. A few at the institute referred to Robinson as an “organists’ organist,” and his faultless accuracy, rhythmic drive, and musical sensitivity were astounding. Regardless of the literature, Opus 288 was convincing. Put simply, it is a really good organ; it was a privilege to hear it played so well day after day.

 

Students, teachers, scholars, and organbuilders

A feature of the institute was a series of masterclasses. While many of the participants opted to visit the region’s historic organs instead, the students worked with the faculty daily on old and new literature. Andrew Scanlon, organ professor from East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina (and a distinguished player in his own right), brought a number of his students. They were excited to study with the faculty, and a Friday-morning program featuring them was enthusiastically applauded.

Significant elements of new scholarship were offered. Barbara Owen’s book, Hook Organs in the State of Maine, recently published by the Organ Historical Society Press (ISBN 978-0-913499-80-1), reinforced the topic of her lecture. David E. Wallace, noted organbuilder from Gorham, Maine, gave a detailed account of current organ work in the state. He also produced a detailed handout on the known work of George Stevens in Maine. George Bozeman presented an admirable presentation-recital on the English voluntary. The Stevens organ at First Parish Church in Belfast—an organ Bozeman beautifully restored in 1975—served the purposes of this genre with distinction and was well-received. James Woodman, a composer of some note, spoke on the attributes of small organs. Vermont’s remarkable organbuilder, A. David Moore, shared some of the challenges he faced recently restoring a Hook organ, Opus 304 (1861), for Bangor’s Hammond Street Congregational Church. His discussion was illustrated, and Moore showed us different types of organ pipes, explaining how their physical characteristics influenced the sound they produced.

Other well-known organ builders were present and added immeasurably to the discussions; among them were William F. Czelusniak, Scot L. Huntington, and the great-granddaddy, the honorable Robert C. Newton. While three organbuilders brought chamber instruments to the institute, it was the superb wood-working skills of Nicholas Wallace (a member of The Diapason’s 20 Under 30 Class of 2015) that most impressed attendees. Expect to hear much more from this young organbuilder in the future.

The Organ Historical Society was much in evidence: no less than three former presidents, several former members of its national council and staff, and a considerable number of current members were present. A few “extras” at the event, such as an old-fashioned, New England chicken-pie supper, and a visit to the award-winning Young’s Lobster Pound in Belfast, were enjoyed. And Lorna and Carlton Russell’s fine and carefully planned demonstration on the elegant 1847 Hook organ in Stockton Springs was greatly appreciated.

We left the institute on Saturday wanting more. Bangor is certainly not on the ordinary traveling routes of most people, and getting there was a challenge for anyone outside northern New England. Some seventy participants came from as far away as Colorado, Georgia, and Texas. St. John’s Organ Society brought a varied group of people together for an extraordinary event that was as enjoyable as it was informative. Putting an event like this together is a lot of work. Sincere thanks and a warm salute were extended to Kevin Birch, Cathy Bruno, and the members of St. John’s Organ Society for a satisfying experience.

 

E. & G. G. Hook Opus 288 (1860)

St. John’s Catholic Church, Bangor, Maine

Great (Manual II)

16′ Bourdon (wood, 56 pipes)

8′ Op. Diapason (metal, 56 pipes)

8′ Melodia (TC, wood, 44 pipes)

8′ Std Diapason Bass (wood, 12 pipes)

4′ Principal (metal, 56 pipes)

4′ Flute (wood, 56 pipes)

22⁄3′ Twelfth (metal, 56 pipes)

2′ Fifteenth (metal, 56 pipes)*

3 ranks Sesquialtra (metal, 168 pipes)

8′ Trumpet (metal, 56 pipes)

4′ Clarion (metal, 56 pipes)

Swell (Manual III, enclosed, balanced Swell pedal, originally hitch-down)

16′ Bourdon (TC, wood, 56 pipes)

8′ Op. Diapason (TC, metal, 44 pipes)*

8′ Viol di Gamba (metal, 56 pipes)*

8′ Stopd Diapason (wood and metal, 

    56 pipes)

4′ Principal (metal, 56 pipes)*

4′ Flute Harmonique (metal, 56 pipes)*

2′ Fifteenth (metal, 56 pipes)*

3 ranks Dulciana Cornet (metal, 161 pipes)

8′ Trumpet (metal, 56 pipes)

8′ Oboe (TC, metal, 44 pipes)*

Tremulant

Choir

16′ Eolina (TC, metal, 44 pipes)

8′ Open Diapason (metal, 56 pipes)

8′ Dulciana (TC, metal, 44 pipes)*

8′ Viola d’Amour (metal, 56 pipes)*

8′ Stopd Diapason (wood, 56 pipes)

4′ Celestina (metal, 56 pipes)*

4′ Flute a’ Chiminee (metal, 56 pipes)

2′ Picolo (metal, 56 pipes)

8′ Cremona (TC, metal, 44 pipes)

8′ Corno di Basetto (CC–C, 12 pipes)

Pedal

16′ Dble. Op. Diapn (wood, 27 pipes)

16′ Dble. Dulciana (wood, 27 pipes)

16′ Grand Posaune (wood, 27 pipes, 

    new, 1981)*

Pedal Check*

Couplers and Mechanicals:

Sw. to Gr.

Sw. to Ch.

Ch. to Gr. Sub 8va.

Gr. to Ped.

Ch. to Ped.

Sw. to Ped.

Bellows Signal*

Combination Pedals:

Four unlabelled single-acting pedals:

Great p

Great f

Swell p

Swell f

Great to Pedal Reversible

 

Manual compass: 56 notes (CC–g3); pedal compass: 27 notes (CCC–D, originally 25 notes)

*Original label missing

 

The organ was first played by Boston organist John Henry Willcox on Christmas Eve, 1860. It was restored by the Bozeman-Gibson Organ Co. in 1981, and more recently has been under the care of Robert C. Newton and the Andover Organ Co. of Methuen, Massachusetts. Opus 288 received Historic Organ Citation no. 319 from the Organ Historical Society in 2005, and remains the largest nineteenth-century historical organ in the state.

 

E. & G. G. Hook (1847)

Community Church, Stockton Springs, Maine

Manual (GGG, AAA–f3, 58 notes)

8′ Op. Diapason (TC, metal, 47 pipes)

8′ Dulciana (TG, metal, 35 pipes)

8′ Clarabella (TG, wood, 35 pipes)

8′ St. Diapason Treble (TC, wood and 

  metal, 35 pipes)

8′ St. Diapason Bass (wood, 23 pipes)

4′ Principal (metal, 58 pipes)

4′ Flute (wood and metal, 58 pipes)

22⁄3′ Twelfth (metal, 58 pipes)

2′ Fifteenth (metal, 58 pipes)

8′ Hautboy (TG, metal, 35 pipes)

Pedal: GGG, AAA–E, 17 notes [no pipes]

Pedal Couple

Pedal Movements:

2 unlabelled single-acting pedals: all stops above 8′ on and off

Bellows Signal

The organ was built in 1847 for the Universalist Church, Bangor, Maine. It was replaced in Bangor by E. & G. G. Hook Opus 318 (1862), a large two-manual organ. In 1864 the 1847 organ was sold for $500 to the Universalist Church, Stockton Springs, Maine, when it was moved and installed in the gallery at an additional cost of $125. During the twentieth century, the congregation became known as the Community Church.

All the metal pipework is common metal. The St. Diapason Treble 8′ and the Flute 4′ are chimney flutes with stopped wood basses. The Clarabella 8′ is actually a Melodia with low cut-ups. The bottom eleven notes of the Open Diapason 8′ are grooved from the St. Diapason Bass 8′. The organ was restored by the Andover Organ Co. of Methuen, Massachusetts, and is unaltered.

Allison Alcorn

Allison A. Alcorn received her PhD from the University of North Texas, Denton, in 1997 and is now professor of musicology at Illinois State University, where she is active in the Honors Program, Study Abroad, and Faculty Development and mentoring. Alcorn served as editor of the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society from 2012–2017 and joined the AMIS Board of Governors in 2017. She has previously served as councilor for research for the Organ Historical Society and on the governing board of the American Organ Archives. Publications include articles for the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments as well as articles in a variety of national and international journals.

A unique figure in the story of the American organ is John Leonard Hinners (1846–1906), who perhaps epitomizes the late nineteenth-century entrepreneurial spirit in the face of the closing frontier (Figure 1). He is something of a musical amalgam of Henry Ford and Montgomery Ward: Ford brought the passenger car to the common man and Hinners brought the pipe organ, and just as Montgomery Ward successfully reached the isolated Midwestern farm house with its mail order merchandise, Hinners reached out to the isolated Midwestern country church with his mail order pipe organ business. Although Hinners was not the only company to use the mail order idea, he seems to have been at least among the most successful with it. In fact, the Hinners Organ Company never extensively employed outside salesmen. All preliminary business was conducted by catalog and letter, the organ was crated up and shipped by rail, and the first time the buyer had any real contact with the company was when an employee, whose expenses were included in the contract, arrived to direct the parishioners in installing the new instrument. John Leonard’s entrepreneurial ambition was clearly shaped by the experiences of his entire life, combining to formulate his ideas about meeting the musical, religious, and social needs of rural churches.

 

Family background

John Leonard Hinners was the son of German immigrants who set out from Hanover, Germany, with a group of Pietists seeking religious freedom. In 1849, Peter Hinners (1824–1887), John Leonard’s father, was accepted as a missionary of the German Methodist Episcopal Church. Peter and his family left Wheeling, West Virginia, to work a circuit in the Midwest, locating variously in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana for the next number of years. Unlike the English-speaking Methodist circuit riders, the German missionaries tended to use river transportation, traversing north on the Mississippi to visit German settlements scattered across the Midwest, particularly along the line of St. Louis-Chicago-Milwaukee, each of which was home to more than 10,000 Germans in 1860. Peter’s particular skill was constructing churches, and many of his assignments involved mission sites in which he erected a church before moving to the next site. With Pekin located as a major port on the Illinois River, the decision to move the John L. Hinners family to Pekin in 1879 may have been related to the work of the Methodist missionaries, among several other factors. 

John Leonard, therefore, spent his childhood in any number of small, rural congregations throughout the Midwest, shaping his future in profound ways. As a musician deeply involved with these churches, he certainly would have felt the limitations of the typical church reed organ from both a musical and an aesthetic/cultural point of view. Moreover, he would have been intimately familiar with the frustration of these rural congregations who struggled to pay their ministers, much less find additional cash for a pipe organ. Peter, known for his skills as a church builder, must have provided John Leonard’s basic woodworking skills, since one might reasonably expect that Peter’s sons would have assisted him with his building projects. Music occupied a central position in the Peter Hinners household as well and so, as Peter’s son, John Leonard was reared with his hands on a hammer and his feet on the pedals, learning skills of building and music that he would later combine into a business that produced nearly 3,000 pipe organs and approximately 20,000 reed organs in its five and a half decades of existence.¹

 

Marketing and sales models

John Leonard accepted a position with Mason & Hamlin in Chicago in the 1870s, a time when reed organs were rapidly gaining popularity throughout America. Music was seen as a worthy pastime, one that was integral to a happy home. Further, owning a reed organ signified a measure of prestige that was second only to the piano, the latter more of a “citified” instrument and the former more of a status symbol in rural areas. Reed organs were such a desirable commodity that in the mid-1880s, a small reed organ was offered by the Ladies’ Home Journal as a premium for submitting 350 one-year subscriptions at .50 each (Figure 2).

The sales techniques of reed organ companies are particularly important, because it appears that John L. Hinners modeled his pipe organ enterprise, both target audience and sales approach, directly on that of the reed organ business. Advertisements in periodical literature were ubiquitous. Everything from popular magazines and newspapers to church journals ran the advertisements of dealers or manufacturers hawking their particular brand of organ. Some ads were a full page, but many were no larger than an inch square, squeezed in among advertisements for women’s shirtwaists and Calumet Baking Powder.

A common technique of these ads was to include an “inquiry address” to which one could write for a free catalog. Often these catalogs—such as the Hinners catalog from 1895 in Figure 3—were not much more than testimonials from satisfied customers, and occasionally the accounts were somewhat improved in the editing process, and some were probably entirely fabricated. Catalog houses such as Montgomery Ward and Sears carried entire lines of musical instruments, including reed organs. The catalog houses’ sales philosophies were followed almost to the letter by John L. Hinners in his pipe organ business.

 

The move to Pekin

Why John Leonard chose to move his family to Pekin, Illinois, in 1879 is a subject for speculation. Pekin is located on the banks of the Illinois River about 50 miles due north of present-day Springfield and was organized under a city charter dated August 20, 1849. It is said that the town was named after Peking, China, when Ann Eliza Cromwell, wife of one of the original town title-holders, pushed a hat pin through “Townsite” on a globe and it came out on the opposite side at Peking, China.² Because of the town’s prime location on the river and its status as a terminal railroad station, numerous industries developed in Pekin. More than that, however, if one conjectures that John Leonard had the rural church market in mind right from the start, a Midwestern location was desirable as an effort to gain the trust of an Eastern-wary rural Midwestern clientele. Because the first settlers in Pekin were primarily native-born Americans, the earliest churches in each denomination were English-speaking, but when the Germans began to arrive in large numbers in the 1850s (attracted initially by the T. & H. Smith Wagon Company), German-speaking congregations were established. The first German congregation in Pekin was the Methodist Episcopal, building a small frame structure in 1850 and becoming a leading congregation in the St. Louis Methodist Conference.

Undoubtedly, the Hinners family had contact with that congregation through their strong involvement with the national German Methodist Episcopal denomination. After his years as a circuit rider, Peter Hinners, John Leonard’s father, functioned as a financial agent for the denomination and traveled frequently to the regional German Methodist Episcopal churches, surely visiting Pekin on a regular basis. Pekin’s congregation even hosted the 1875 Conference of the German Methodist Episcopals, which John Leonard may well have attended, probably then meeting Fred Schaefer, for whom he initially manufactured his reed organs. Schaefer was a member of the church, and as a musical instrument dealer, he certainly would have spoken with an employee of Mason & Hamlin who happened to be visiting his church. In the course of conversations, it would have been quite natural for John Leonard to voice his frustrations with hopes of advancing within the Mason & Hamlin operation as well as his desire to build his own organs. The scope of Schaefer’s businesses shows him to be nothing if not enterprising (Figure 4), and it is easy to picture the wheels turning in his mind at the idea of enticing a young organbuilder to manufacture reed organs for him right there in Pekin. The city did offer a small amount of competition for the Hinners organs. In an 1878 Pekin newspaper, Geiger & Thompson’s Sewing Machine Exchange also advertised “the Matchless Burdett Organ” (Figure 5).

After Chicago, however, the competition in Pekin offered little intimidation or resistance for the ambitions of John Leonard, though some even continued to offer Mason & Hamlin organs, like the local musical merchandise dealer in this advertisement in Figure 6. Another competitor, however, succumbed to the offer of employment by the Hinners firm, as is documented in the 25th anniversary booklet listing Gilbert Skaggs as a 14-year employee. Skaggs is cited in the 1905 Pekin City Directory as an independent organbuilder and may have been one of the men recruited to help get the pipe organ enterprise underway, as his tenure coincides with the beginning of pipe organ production.

Regardless of the impetus, John L. Hinners’s Perfection Organ Manufactory in Pekin began a new era of industry for the region. He set up shop in a back room of Schaefer’s new building on Court Street, across from the courthouse and spent the next ten years building reed organs, perfecting the skills and techniques he would then apply to the manufacture of pipe organs. Specifically, in addition to the marketing and sales acumen modeled on the reed organ trade, John Leonard brought to his pipe organs an understanding of compactness, mechanical reliability, and superb carpentry that he had learned in reed organ construction.³ Perhaps the most important entrepreneurial application, later seen as a defining characteristic of the pipe organs, was his standardization of the reed organ. In an 1895 Hinners Reed Organ catalog (in English and German) he lays out just five action types and ten cabinet styles. By strictly controlling variations, he was able to produce them literally by the dozens. When he turned this idea to pipe organs, such standardization permitted him to offer quality instruments at significantly lower prices.

 

Hinners & Albertsen

Schaefer sold his instrument manufactory and musical merchandise business in early 1881. John Leonard took the opportunity to cash in on the reputation he had built for himself in the previous year and recruited a group of local investors to back the Perfection Organ Works as a private reed organ factory. Ubbo J. Albertsen (Figure 7) purchased the interest of the original investors in 1885, and the company became Hinners & Albertsen.⁴ With the infusion of Albertsen’s capital, the firm expanded once again and reed organ sales soared. The turn to pipe organ production was announced in a special catalog that was written in German and English—with a sketch of the Boston Music Hall organ on the cover. These Hinners & Albertsen organs had one manual and pedals, available in three ranks for $375, four ranks for $485, five ranks for $575, and six ranks for the bargain price of $635. The 1890 catalog introduced “Our New No. 5 Pipe Organ” for $485 with economical specifications:

 

8′ Open Diapason (metal, 61 pipes)

8′ Melodia (wood 61 pipes, enclosed)

8′ Gamba (metal, 61 pipes, enclosed)

4′ Principal (metal, 61 pipes)

 

16′ Pedal Bourdon (wood, 15 pipes)

 

Super Coupler

Manual to Pedal Coupler

Swell Pedal

The three-rank organ included two 8′ ranks and one 4′ rank; for the five-rank instrument, they added a 2′ rank to the No. 5 specifications, and the six-rank organ added two 2′ ranks to the No. 5 specifications. Churches close to Pekin could reduce the cost by sending members of its congregation to the factory with their own wagons, handling drayage and set-up themselves. In this case, the organ would cost only $75 a rank, which amounts to a significant savings for budget-minded congregations.

If shipped, the swell box served as the shipping crate, and many of these still have the shipping labels nailed to what is now the inside of the box (Figure 8, nailed on the far back side). In the early years, all of the non-local organs were shipped via the railway. The pipes and components, all numbered, were placed in numbered crates and loaded into the boxcars. When the organ arrived at its destination, church members retrieved the crates from the depot along with the company representative who directed the organ’s installation. The numbering system (cf. Figure 9) made installation quick and easy, usually requiring only one company man to oversee the operation, though larger organs sometimes required teams of two or, rarely, three. The Hinners representative’s signature and the installation date is often found penciled somewhere inside the instrument, frequently somewhere on or in the swell box. Trucks eventually replaced the horse-drawn wagons, and organs within an eleven-state radius of Illinois were delivered by truck, which drove at a top speed of 25 miles per hour. The Hinners firm managed to keep even the switch to motorized drayage within the family—or at least within the extended organ family—when Philip Kriegsman, a 13-year tuner for Hinners, purchased the drayage company that had been handling organ shipping and became the contractor who moved the organ business from horse-drawn wagons to motorized vehicles.

The 1898 Hinners & Albertsen organ built for the St. Peter Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Red Wing, Minnesota, exemplifies the typical smaller two-manual organ (Figure 10). Like the reed organs, the one-manual pipe organs had a keyboard divided at middle C, each half controlled by a treble and bass knob. Most often, the Hinners & Albertsen pedal ranks encompassed only the lower octave, and the second octave was supplied as a pull-down. The catalogs claimed that the notes above the lower octave were only very rarely used for church services, and so they were omitted “as a needless expenditure.”

 

To be continued.

 

Notes

1. Cf. Allison Alcorn, “A History of the Hinners Organ Company of Pekin, Illinois,” The Tracker, vol. 44, no. 3 (2000): 13–25. The Tracker article provides a more detailed account of the complete company history, though much in the present article’s overview is indebted to that work. This article provides a simple company overview up to the date of the Red Wing organ and then a focus on the story of that Red Wing, Minnesota, instrument.

2. Louella Dirksen, The Honorable Mr. Marigold (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 1. Mrs. Cromwell must have had a rather crooked pin, actually, because the direct antipode of Pekin is in the Indian Ocean off the far southwestern tip of Australia.

3. Unfortunately, the only Hinners organ remaining in Pekin is at St. John Lutheran Church. In 2014 it was rebuilt by the Buzard Organ Company of Champaign, Illinois. The original console was gone, so they used a 1927 console from the Hinners built for Hope Reformed Church in Chicago plus a number of other console materials from the Hinners that had been built for the Pekin Elks Club Lodge (the last Hinners pipe organ built before the company closed). Some odds and ends were used in the interior from the 1913 organ built for the Hinners’ family church, which assumed the non-Germanic name of Grace Methodist Episcopal Church when it rebuilt in 1914 after a devastating 1911 fire. That organ is now completely dismantled, with only the façade pipes remaining as visual display to house an Allen electronic organ. 

4. An unfortunate typographical error in the 2000 Tracker article (op. cit., 15) cites “Uddo” J. Albertsen as John Leonard’s partner. Some confusion had already existed about Albertsen, as early sources sometimes incorrectly reference Urban J. Albertsen as the partner in the organ business. Urban, however, was not born until 1887, and it was his father, Ubbo J. Abertsen (1845–1926), who bought into the Hinners organ enterprise.

Randall Dyer & 

Associates, Inc.

Jefferson City, Tennessee

Greeneville Cumberland 

Presbyterian Church

Greeneville, Tennessee

This edifice is known locally as the “cannon-ball church” because of the Civil War cannon ball impaled in the front door jamb. The church’s new organ replaces an electronic instrument that was less than 25 years old. 

Exercising due diligence, the organ committee visited several installations and was intrigued by a similar organ at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, in Norton, Virginia. While the term “multum in parvo” could be applied to both organs, a more accurate description would probably be “careful selection of the elements, to maximize the usefulness of the instrument.” Both organs are outgrowths of the Antiphonal division of our organ at  Church Street United Methodist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and both follow our recent return to straight design in small organs.

The organ has a robust sound that is broad, but clear. Because all but the 8′ Principals are enclosed, the entire organ can be used for choral accompaniment. The couplers are an important part of maximizing the usefulness of the organ and are carefully selected to add to the flexibility of the stoplist without overbalancing the ensemble.

Since the chancel of the church was added in the 1950s, organ sound, including that of an earlier 1913 Estey that had been moved from the front corner, emanated from a side location with a high, small opening. By removing an unused chimney and relocating the altar committee’s storage area to the old organ chamber, the new organ was installed across the front of the room in a space only 42 inches deep.

Visible speaking Principal pipes are from the Great (left) and Pedal (right) divisions. Materials used in construction of the pipes include tin and lead, in varying percentages, aluminum for larger metal pipes, and wood for the bass pipes of the Pedal.

Manual keys on the console are covered in cowbone and rosewood. The organ is provided with a multi-level combination system as well as transposer and record/playback capability.

The organ’s pipes are situated on Blackinton-style slider-and-pallet wind chests, and connection to the organ console is by a single fiber-optic strand.

Randall Dyer & Associates is a member firm of the Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America.

—Randall Dyer

 

GREAT (enclosed except as noted)

8′ Principal 53 pipes

    (façade, 1–8 from Pedal Octave)

8′ Chimney Flute 49 pipes

    (1–12 from Pedal Bourdon)

4′ Octave 61 pipes

2′ Fifteenth (from Mixture)

II Cornet (TC–f/54) 84 pipes

III Mixture 183 pipes

8′ Trumpet (Sw)

Chimes

Cymbelstern

MIDI

Swell to Great 16

Swell to Great 8

Swell to Great 4

 

SWELL (enclosed)

8′ Stopped Flute 61 pipes

8′ Viola 61 pipes

8′ Viola Celeste (TC) 49 pipes

4′ Gemshorn 61 pipes

8′ Trumpet 61 pipes

Tremulant (entire organ)

MIDI

Swell 4

PEDAL

16′ Subbass 44 pipes

8′ Octave (façade) 44 pipes

8′ Subbass (ext)

4′ Octave (ext)

16′ Trumpet (ext Sw) 12 pipes

MIDI

Great to Pedal 8

Swell to Pedal 8

Swell to Pedal 4

Jack Bethards

First Presbyterian Church,
Monterey, California

Schoenstein & Co. Pipe Organ Builders, Benicia, California

The work of Murray M. Harris, the legendary Los Angeles organ builder whose firm built what is now the nucleus of Philadelphia’s Wanamaker organ, is much admired, especially here in the West where a few of his brilliant creations survive untouched. Organist, organ technician, and historian Thomas L. DeLay, serving as the consultant for First Presbyterian Church of Monterey, California, contacted us about a new organ. DeLay told me that he had invited the committee to a church where he played a 1910 Murray M. Harris organ. This was an educational session just to show the committee the parts of an instrument and how they worked; it was not to talk about tone. In fact, he was a bit concerned that they might be put off by an “old-fashioned” instrument. Much to his surprise and delight, when he demonstrated the instrument, the committee was absolutely captivated and said, “That’s the kind of sound we want!”

Tom asked if we could make something with a bit of the Murray M. Harris character. We could, but wouldn’t it be better to have the real thing or something close to it? One of our long-term clients had an organ in storage with us that was about 90% from Murray M. Harris Opus 91 of 1912. We also had in stock several stops from Opus 83 of 1911. I suggested that we make a brand-new reproduction Murray M. Harris organ with mostly original pipes. The two churches got together and made an arrangement favorable to both, and we set out on one of our most interesting projects.  

Every part of this two-manual, 26-voice, 28-rank organ is new and based on the Schoenstein System except the original pipework. Our windchests happened to be appropriate for Murray M. Harris pipes, having a similar expansion chamber that elongates the wind path between valve and pipe toe. The entire organ is under expression speaking down the long axis of the church with Great and Pedal in one chamber and Swell in the other. The church went to great lengths improving the organ chambers with effective insulation and temperature control. The previous organ had suffered badly from swings in temperature. (Yes, it happens in Monterey!)  

The console is a reproduction of the Murray M. Harris style of the period. An original console was thoroughly measured and photographed. Every detail of the cabinetry is an exact match as are drawknobs and other accessories. To give the instrument added flexibility, the console is equipped with modern playing aids of the Peterson ICS system and has a third manual that draws mainly solo stops from the Great and Swell divisions.

All of the original pipework was carefully cleaned and prepared in our voicing rooms. Fortunately, the pipework had been well preserved over the years and not altered. The stoplist is very much of the period with 69% of its stops at 8′ pitch or below, but they are brimming with color and character. Typical of Harris organs, the upperwork adds a completely satisfying and perfectly balanced glow to the sound. The Dolce Cornet is new but based strictly on Murray M. Harris models of Salicional scale. It has found multiple uses. Of special interest is the Harris tradition of celestes that work with either medium or soft unisons. In this organ they are found on both Swell and Great. The tonal result is a versatile church organ fully suitable to modern demands.

Many modern instruments have been made on 18th- and 19th-century models, but this reproduction in the early 20th-century style may find a new audience for just plain beautiful tone. The instrument was presented in a recital on May 6, 2017, featuring five performers associated over the years with the church: Tiffany Truett Bedner, Aaron Nee, Kitty Du Vernois, organ consultant Thomas DeLay, and current organist Margaret Bellisomi. A formal dedication recital was given by James Welch on September 9 featuring works by Bach, Gounod, Hollins, Parry, Vierne, Clokey, Purvis, and Nevin, among others. The organ project manager for the church is Walt Prowell, the music director is John Koza, and the pastor is Reverend Mark Peake.

—Jack Bethards

President and Tonal Director

Schoenstein & Co.

Three manuals and pedal, incorporating pipes from 1911 and 1912 Murray M. Harris organs: 26 voices, 28 ranks, electric-pneumatic action.  

GREAT (II – Expressive) 

8′ First Open Diapason* 61 pipes 

8′ Second Open Diapason 61 pipes 

8′ Melodia* 61 pipes 

8′ Unda-Maris (TC)* 49 pipes 

8′ Dulciana* 61 pipes 

4′ Octave 61 pipes 

4′ Flute d’Amour* 61 pipes 

22⁄3′ Octave Quint 61 pipes 

2′ Super Octave 61 pipes 

16′ Trombone 12 pipes 

8′ Tuba 61 pipes 

8′ Clarinet 61 pipes 

Tremulant 

Great 16 

Great Unison Off 

Great 4 

SWELL (III – Expressive) 

16′ Bourdon* 61 pipes  

8′ Violin Diapason* 61 pipes 

8′ Stopped Diapason* 61 pipes 

8′ Salicional* 61 pipes 

8′ Vox Celeste (TC)* 49 pipes 

8′ Aeoline* 61 pipes 

4′ Fugara 61 pipes 

4′ Harmonic Flute* 61 pipes 

2′ Piccolo 61 pipes 

Dolce Cornet III 171 pipes 

8′ Trumpet 61 pipes 

8′ Oboe* 61 pipes 

8′ Vox Humana† 61 pipes 

Tremulant 

Swell 16 

Swell Unison Off 

Swell 4 

†with separate Tremulant 

SOLO (I) 

Great Stops

8′ First Open Diapason 

8′ Second Open Diapason 

8′ Unda-Maris II 

8′ Tuba 

4′ Flute d’Amour 

8′ Clarinet 

Swell Stops

8′ Violin Diapason 

8′ Stopped Diapason 

8′ Harmonic Flute (4′ Harm. Flute; 

    Aeoline & St. Diap. bass) 

8′ Vox Celeste II 

8′ Trumpet 

8′ Oboe 

8′ Vox Humana (with Tremulant) 

Chimes†

Solo 16 

Solo Unison Off 

Solo 4 

†From existing organ

PEDAL 

32′ Resultant (Open Diapason/Bourdon)

16′ Open Diapason (wood)* 32 pipes 

16′ Bourdon (former Tibia)*  32 pipes 

16′ Lieblich Gedeckt (Swell) 

8′ Open Diapason (Great 2nd Open) 

8′ Violin Diapason (Swell) 

8′ Lieblich Gedeckt (Swell) 

4′ Octave (Great First Open) 

16′ Trombone (Great) 

8′ Trumpet (Swell) 

4′ Oboe (Swell) 

*Murray M. Harris pipes 

 

COUPLERS 

Great to Pedal 

Great to Pedal 4 

Swell to Pedal 

Swell to Pedal 4 

Solo to Pedal 

Solo to Pedal 4 

 

Swell to Great 16 

Swell to Great 

Swell to Great 4 

Solo to Great 

 

Great to Solo 

Great to Solo 4 

Swell to Solo 

Swell to Solo 4 

 

MECHANICALS 

Solid-state capture combination action with: 

• 100 Memory levels

• Programmable piston range for each 

memory level

• 40 Pistons and toe studs.

• 7 Reversibles including Full Organ.

• Record/Playback

Crescendo pedal 

Adjustable bench