Raymond Brunner dead at 71

Raymond James Brunner, 71, organbuilder and organ historian, died November 17, 2020, in East Petersburg, Pennsylvania. Born June 19, 1949, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he was the author of a comprehensive study of 18th- and 19th-century Pennsylvania German organbuilders and their instruments, That Ingenious Business, published in 1990 by the Pennsylvania German Society. He was a member of the Organ Historical Society and the American Institute of Organbuilders.

In February 1981, Mr. Brunner founded the organbuilding firm Brunner & Heller in Marietta, Pennsylvania, with Alan E. Heller (1952–2008), becoming sole proprietor of R. J. Brunner & Co. of Silver Spring, Pennsylvania, in October 1984. Both had worked as organbuilders at James R. McFarland & Co., Millersville, Pennsylvania. The Brunner firm reorganized in 2016 as Brunner & Associates, LLC, with partners Hans Herr and Thomas Becker.

Organ restorations performed by Brunner and his firm include the organ built in 1770 by David Tannenberg at Zion Moselem Lutheran Church, Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and partial restoration of the 1804 Tannenberg at the York County Historical Society, York, Pennsylvania. Other restorations and restorative repairs include 18th- and 19th-century organs built by Krauss, Doll, Jardine, Felgemaker, E. W. Lane, Bohler, Pilcher, M. P. Möller, Hook & Hastings, Hall & Labagh, and others. As well, the firm has restored and rebuilt organs of later periods and actions and built new organs of mechanical and electro-pneumatic actions.

A 1971 graduate of Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with a degree in civil engineering, Brunner worked eight years with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation in the Research and Development Department, becoming licensed as a professional engineer. He then switched careers to pursue organbuilding and his lifelong interests in precision woodworking and cabinetmaking, antiques, and Pennsylvania German history and culture. He was largely influenced by his grandmother, the late Hattie Klapp Brunner (1889–1982), who was a well-known researcher and dealer in Pennsylvania German antiques, becoming a celebrated folk-art painter at age 67 with her grandson’s encouragement.

Brunner attended Holy Spirit Lutheran Church for 35 years. He enjoyed classic cars, trains, and was a member of the Studebaker Drivers Club of America and the Studebaker Drivers Club-Keystone Region. Other pastimes included reading, especially early American history and genealogy, as well as world travel with his wife, Martha, and boating, camping, and swimming with his family on his family’s island in the Susquehanna River.

Raymond Brunner is survived by his wife, Martha Sweigart Brunner, and by his children with his first wife, organbuilder Ruth E. Rissmiller Brunner (1958–2003): Owen J. Brunner (Jaimie) of Bel Air, Maryland; Amy E. Moore (Jeffrey) of Columbia, Pennsylvania; and Amelia R. Brunner (fiancée of Nicholas), Rochester, New York. A public memorial service will be planned for a later date.

Charles George Hendrickson, 85, died in St. Peter, Minnesota, December 17, 2020. Born June 10, 1935, in Willmar, Minnesota, he graduated from Willmar High School in 1953, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota, in 1957, and University of Arkansas-Fayetteville in 1963 with a master’s degree in physics after building his own furnace from salvage parts based on his calculations to grow a single crystal of aluminum. He had started his graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, but then taught physics at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. While there, his interest in astronomy led him to restore the telescope tracking in their observatory to operating condition. He also built his own six-inch reflecting telescope, grinding and silvering the mirrors himself. After graduate school at the University of Arkansas, he also taught at Union University, Jackson, Tennessee, and Northeast State University, Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

After meeting his future wife Birgitta Gillberg, he taught physics at Mankato State College, now Mankato State University, Mankato, Minnesota. They were married in Sweden in 1964. That same year he was approached by family friend Rev. Lambert Engwall to build a pipe organ for First Lutheran Church, Winthrop, Minnesota. Having been his passion since helping with the installation of the organ at his home church during high school, this was the start of the business he would lead until his retirement. Hendrickson Organ Co. began in the Hendrickson garage in St. Peter and soon moved to a new building on the north end of town. His sons, Eric and Andreas, eventually succeeded him in the business.

Charles’s wife, Birgitta, died in 2018. Charles George Hendrickson is survived by his sons Eric and Andreas (Eva) Hendrickson, along with grandchildren Roy and Vivian.

See the article, “Charles Hendrickson: Profile of a Minnesota Organbuilder,” by David Fienen, in the June 2017 issue of The Diapason (pages 20–22).

Michael Jarvis of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 62, died December 25, 2020. A harpsichordist, chamber organist, and fortepianist, he also served as a soloist, arranger, and choir director. Born in Quebec, he worked in Nova Scotia and Ontario, focusing on rarely heard early chamber music repertoire.

Jarvis taught at University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, and Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, among other institutions, before moving to Victoria five years ago with his wife, Carolyn Sinclair. He continued to perform in ensembles and choirs in recent years around British Columbia, Alberta, Washington State, and Oregon.

Jarvis was a regular performer at Victoria’s Pacific Baroque Festival and often arranged concerts on his own with Paul Luchkow, his most frequent collaborator, at Christ Church Cathedral. Jarvis was also artistic director of Bach on the Rock Music Society, the umbrella organization for Salt Spring Chamber Choir and Salt Spring Chamber Orchestra, and music director for St. Barnabas Anglican Church, Victoria.

Luchkow and Jarvis performed together as a duo and with British viola da gambist Sam Stadlen in LSJ Trio, which released its debut CD last year. Only three of the five albums Luchkow and Jarvis recorded together have been released thus far.

That ingenious business

Great Britain’s King George III (1738–1820), whose oppressive rule over the American colonies led to the American Revolutionary War, has resurfaced in public conversation as a character in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical, Hamilton. In the king’s featured song, “You’ll be back” (in the style of The Beatles), the crazy king addresses the colonists, singing,

Why so sad? Remember we made an arrangement when you went away? Now you’re making me mad. Remember, despite our estrangement, I’m your man. You’ll be back, soon you’ll see, you’ll remember you belong to me. . . . And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love. . . .

Wendy and I were fortunate to see Hamilton in the first months of its run on Broadway and were thrilled by the whirling, swirling singing and dancing from the first moments. Sitting to my right was a curmudgeonly man who looked like Winston Churchill (though thankfully not as large) who did not crack a smile until King George made his mincing appearance.

The American pipe organ industry started in the eighteenth century before the birth of “Mad King George.” Johann Gottlob Klemm (1690–1762) was born in Dresden, Germany, where he apparently apprenticed with the great organ builder Gottfried Silbermann (1683–1753). Silbermann was nearly an exact contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), who was a great champion of Silbermann’s organs, though a little skeptical of the pianofortes Silbermann built late in his life. Klemm built the first organ for the church now known as Trinity Church Wall Street, New York (in a previous building at the same location), and lived in New York City’s Moravian community until 1757, when he learned that the Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, needed an organ.¹

David Tannenberg (1728–1804) was born in Germany, moved to Zeist, the Netherlands, in 1748, and emigrated to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1749. He first worked as a joiner, and when Klemm arrived in Bethlehem in 1757, he became Klemm’s apprentice and assistant. After Klemm’s death in 1762 Tannenberg did no organ work for three years, but between 1765 and his death in 1804 he was involved in building more than forty organs.² As he grew older and became concerned that he had no apprentice who could carry on his work, Tannenberg obtained permission from the Moravian elders in Lititz, Pennsylvania, to write to elders in Herrnhut, Germany, asking them to send a suitable candidate. In response, Johann Philip Bachmann (1762–1837) arrived in Bethlehem on February 17, 1793. Two months later he married Tannenberg’s daughter, Anna Maria. Tannenberg and Bachmann worked together building organs until 1800 when tensions between them following Anna Maria’s suicide in 1799 led to their parting ways.³ While installing the organ in the Lutheran church in York, Pennsylvania, seventy-six-year-old David Tannenberg fell from a scaffolding on May 17, 1804, and died two days later.⁴

While most of David Tannenberg’s organs were built in Pennsylvania, he also built instruments for destinations in Albany, New York; Frederick, Maryland; and Salem, North Carolina. It is almost 500 miles from Bethlehem to Salem. I can drive that far in less than seven hours in air-conditioned comfort. It must have been a rough slog to transport an organ such a distance on eighteenth-century roads. There are only a few Tannenberg organs extant, notably the 1798 “Single Brothers’ House” organ restored by Taylor & Boody and installed in a new concert hall at the Museum of Early Southern and Decorative Arts in Old Salem, North Carolina.

Philip Bachmann built organs under his own name until 1821. An organ built by Bachmann in 1819 has been restored by Paul Fritts & Company in Tacoma, Washington, and is now available for installation in a suitable historic and architectural home. You can read the prospectus and see photos at the Fritts website: frittsorgan.com/opus_pages/galleries/bachmann_reconstruct/bachmann_prospectus.html.

Consider these dates. Klemm’s career in America started in the late 1730s—his organ at Trinity Church Wall Street was built in 1741, nine years before Bach’s death. Tannenberg’s career was in full swing in the 1770s, concurrent with the American Revolutionary War. Bachmann died in 1837 when Felix Mendelssohn was twenty-eight and Johannes Brahms was four years old. Klemm, Tannenberg, and Bachmann were all German-born American immigrants who built dozens of organs for the Moravian communities in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina during America’s Colonial period. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791; he was twenty years old at the start of the American Revolution.

Three important books

Orpha Ochse (born 1925) received a Master of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music in 1948 and a PhD in 1953. She is ninety-eight years old. The University of Indiana Press published her masterful The History of the Organ in the United States in 1975. The worn and be-scribbled hardcover copy on my desk in Maine is inscribed with my name and “Oberlin, 1975.” I purchased it from the Co-op Bookstore in Oberlin the year it was published. I was nineteen.

Ochse’s book includes the histories of hundreds of American organbuilders, both companies and individuals. She traces the connections between personalities telling us who worked and apprenticed for whom, who influenced whom, and who formed and dissolved partnerships. The book is organized by regions and eras (“Rural Society,” “Expanding Society,” “Industrial Society,” “the Twentieth Century”). The comprehensive index includes thousands of entries making it a necessary first tool for someone like me who spends each day in the office considering and discussing dozens of organs. Many of the biographical details I am including here came straight from Ochse’s book.

The History of the Organ in the United States was released in paperback in 1988 and is still available from the University of Indiana Press, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers. If there is an organist in your life who does not own a copy, here is a great gift suggestion. Tell them I sent you.

Organbuilder Raymond Brunner (1949–2020) lived and worked around Lititz and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, home of many organs built by David Tannenberg and the other Moravian-Pennsylvania Dutch organbuilders. He wrote the authoritative history of that era of American organbuilding under the title That Ingenious Business, published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1991. It includes technical and mathematical information of interest to the sophisticated organbuilder and portrayal of daily life at the end of the eighteenth century, such as a drawing of a Sunday morning at Christ Lutheran Church in York, Pennsylvania, with main floor and balcony packed with worshippers, the Tannenberg organ, a preacher gesticulating from the pulpit, and an usher with a stick chasing a dog. ’Twas ever thus. I last saw Ray at breakfast in New York during early planning for the restoration of the organ at Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I am sorry he did not live to see it.

Stephen L. Pinel’s The Work-list of Henry Erben, Organ Builder in Nineteenth-Century New York was published by the OHS Press, the Organ Historical Society, in 2021. It is a 624-page monster with appendices and indices that include many historical photographs, timelines, and detailed descriptions of most every Erben organ, alongside contemporary descriptions, reviews, often accompanied by newspaper articles. Its six pounds of minutia about one of America’s most influential organbuilders means that it is not a book for everyone, but a carefully researched, exhaustive tome of immense value.

An urban Erben

Henry Erben (1800–1884) was a premier organbuilder in New York City who built hundreds of organs for locations in New York, New England, and as far away as Texas and California. Imagine the logistics of moving an organ from New York to San Francisco in 1858. Calvary Church (Presbyterian) in San Francisco was formed in 1854 and commissioned an organ from Erben shortly after. The organ was completed in 1858 and loaded onto the clipper ship Caroline Tucker, which left New York on May 13, 1858, and carried the organ around Cape Horn “west about” to San Francisco.⁵

Erben’s father Peter (1771–1863) built organs and pianos and was organist at Trinity Church, New York (known now as Trinity Church Wall Street), into the 1840s. Thomas Hall (1791–c.1875) was an organbuilder who started working in Philadelphia around 1812. In that same year he installed an organ in Saint John’s Chapel in New York and was assisted by twelve-year-old Henry Erben. Hall moved to New York in 1817, and Henry became his apprentice. They formed the partnership Hall & Erben in 1821, which was dissolved in 1835.⁶ Between 1824 and his death in 1884, Henry Erben produced 1,333 organs, 250 of which were built between 1856 and 1860, the firm’s busiest five years.⁷ That’s more than an organ a week. In 1846 Erben built a new four-manual organ for Trinity Church Wall Street (replaced by Hook & Hastings Opus 2168 in 1907), where he quarreled publicly with the church’s organist, Dr. Edward Hodges, who had succeeded his father.

The Erben workshop was located on a corner of Canal and Centre Streets in lower Manhattan, in the neighborhood now known as Little Italy, one mile from Trinity Church. Erben’s largest intact extant organ was built in 1868 for what is now the Basilica of Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral at Prince and Mulberry Streets in NoLIta (north of Little Italy), just six blocks north of the workshop. As I write, the Organ Clearing House is completing the dismantling of the organ at Old Saint Patrick’s and shipping it to Brunner & Company in Pennsylvania for restoration. I was in the city last week as the project started and walked between those two churches. It was fun to imagine running into Mr. Erben as he walked the streets between his workshop and two of his important clients. Maybe I would treat him to a fruit smoothie, ubiquitous in the neighborhood today. I wonder what would amaze him most about modern organbuilding? Perhaps electric blowers?

Another Erben afloat

In 2006 the Organ Clearing House sent an Erben organ halfway around the world when the Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem in Wellington, New Zealand, purchased a one-manual, six-rank organ built in 1847 from Saint Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, Ellsworth, Maine. The Clearing House crew crated the organ and delivered it to the docks in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it was loaded into a container for its 9,000-mile journey.

The organ’s specifications are 8′ Open Diapason (18–56), 8′ Stopped Diapason (18–56), 8′ Stopped Diapason Bass (1–17), 8′ Dulciana (18–56), 4′ Principal, 4′ Flute, and 2′ Fifteenth. There is a permanent coupler from the manual to the seventeen-note pedalboard.

That was the second time that organ traveled by boat. Ellsworth is a small coastal town with a population of about 8,400 located to the northeast of Penobscot Bay in a series of bays and waterways that defines Down East Maine. In the late 1840s there were about 4,000 people living in Ellsworth, and the town boasted nine sawmills, two gristmills, one tannery, eight brickyards, and thirteen shipbuilders, along with several other industries.⁸ There was plenty of work in Ellsworth. To drive there today, one winds along US Route 1, which crosses many bridges over water as it navigates Maine’s legendary rocky coast. It would have been an arduous trip by land in 1847, and traveling by sea was the most efficient and economical way to transport passengers and freight.

The Erben workshop was less than a mile from the docks in New York City, and the Episcopal church in Ellsworth is barely a block from the Union River. The Ellsworth organ traveled only slightly farther by land than the great organs at Old Saint Patrick’s and Trinity Church in New York, mere blocks from the workshop.

§

One of the highlights of visiting an organbuilder’s workshop is the fine woodworking that is such an integral part of the product. Hardwood frame-and-panel doors are as integral to a modern organ case as they were in centuries past, and many internal components sport dovetails and other classic joinery. We identify what variety of wood is being used by the smell in the milling room. There is no mistaking the difference in smell between sawing poplar or white oak.⁹

The same is true with boat building. Several of the coastal Maine towns with shipbuilding heritages are now home to small shops that build wooden pleasure boats by hand, and while organbuilders typically strive for perfectly square corners and straight lines, you hardly find any in a wooden boat. The bow comes to a point, midships swells to the maximum “beam” (width) and tapers back to a narrower stern. The hull often bulbs out a little from the top rails and tapers to a narrow keel below. Viewed from the side, the fairing line of the hull sweeps upward toward the bow. Every line and surface is a complex curve, which means the interior spaces are also full of curves and odd angles.

To start building a boat, the layout of the hull is drawn on the workshop floor looking something like a topographical map with increasing curved lines showing elevation. The keel is placed, and ribs are constructed according to the curves of the hull. The completed keel and ribs look something like a whale’s skeleton turned upside down. The outside of the hull is formed by “planking,” steaming and bending the planks, also called strakes, and fastening them to the ribs. The process reminds me of my years as an apprentice to John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, when we steamed boards until they were flexible and clamped them to a frame to form the bentside of a harpsichord. We had built a box just big enough to enclose the piece of lumber with a goofy rig using tea kettles on hot plates to produce the steam and the flexible tubing we use in organs to conduct the steam to the box. It was one thing to fire up that cute contraption and handle a piping hot board six feet long, one foot wide, and three-quarters of an inch thick. It is quite another to steam and bend a twenty-footer that is two inches thick and bend that around the ribs of a boat.

I witnessed this process on a large scale at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, where the 110-foot whaling ship Charles W. Morgan was being restored in the museum’s shipyard. Watching the workers fastening those massive thick boards to the ribs with wood pegs and bronze spikes was a glimpse back into the time when all ships were made of wood and no ships had engines.

Our boat, a Marshall catboat, had a reliable diesel engine in a spacious hold below the deck that I was happy to use when approaching a dock or mooring. I remember once watching a single-handed sailor leave a crowded mooring field in a large two-masted schooner under full sail. He let go of the mooring line, walked some forty feet back to the wheel, and away he went, weaving through the fleet as if he was rowing a skiff, harking back to the days when diesel engines were not an option, so seamen had to have real skill. Shortly after we bought our boat, I wrote an essay for Catboat Journal about the adventures Wendy and I had sailing her from the boatyard in Padanaram, Massachusetts (near New Bedford), to our house on the Damariscotta River in Maine, 250 miles in six days and five nights. I received an email from a fellow in California who would be teaching a course on handling catboats at the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin, Maine, not far from Ellsworth, saying if we happened to be near Brooklin he’d love to have us address the class. We “happened” to be near Brooklin at the stated date because we arranged our summer around it and had a week-long cruise that took us there.

He invited another catboat sailor to share stories with the class, a veteran single-hander who sailed an older version of the same model boat. The important difference was his boat didn’t have an engine. Fogged in, sit and read. Bad weather coming, sit and read. Need to get ashore for emergency or otherwise, but no wind? Sit and read. We were having dinner at a pub after the class, chatting about our boats, and I told Bill how much I admired his career of sailing single-handed without an engine. His response, “Where do you keep the wine?”

Notes

1. Orpha Ochse, The History of the Organ in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), page 15.

2. Ibid, page 52.

3. Ibid, page 62.

4. Ibid, page 53.

5. Stephen L. Pinel, The Work-list of Henry Erben, Organ Builder in Nineteenth-Century New York (Villanova, Pennsylvania: OHS Press, the Organ Historical Society, 2021), page 165.

6. Ochse, page 151.

7. Pinel, page 18.

8. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth,_Maine.

9. The smell of sawing ivory or cow bone reminds me of the worst day at the dentist.

Stephen L. Pinel holds two degrees from Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey, and did graduate study in historical musicology at New York University. A church musician for forty-five years, he retired from full-time work in the fall of 2017, but immediately accepted another appointment as organist and choirmaster at All Saints Church, Bay Head, New Jersey. 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 the author of several books and regularly contributes articles on organ history both here and abroad.

In 1984, William T. Van Pelt, then the executive director of the Organ Historical Society, wrote in The Tracker: Concomitant to the popularity of photography at the end of the nineteenth century was the blossoming of picture postcards that fortuitously embraced organs and church interiors among a wide range of subjects. Cards provide the examples we need to study architectonics and the visual evolution of organs, as well as traits of contemporary builders and their instruments. In some cases, a card represents the only remaining record of an organ’s existence.²

An accomplished photographer, Van Pelt had an uncanny awareness of the pipe organ as an entity of visual art. Like fine furniture, painting, sculpture, or any other form of high art, organ cases designed by organbuilders are distinctive and have identifiable characteristics. Cognizant of their usefulness for study, Van Pelt challenged the members of the OHS to search local antique and book stores for postcards showing vintage pipe organs. By the time his article was prepared for publication, ten society members had submitted more than a hundred cards. Sixteen were chosen to illustrate the article.³ In the thirty-five years since his article appeared, hundreds of organ postcards have surfaced, showing a wide variety of instruments by dozens of American organbuilders.

For context, some fundamentals of postcards may be informative. Cards are usually printed on thick paper or thin cardboard and measure approximately 3½ by 5½ inches. An image appears on the front, while the back is bifurcated—a message is written on the left with the address on the right. When mailed, postcards usually have a lesser rate than first-class postage, so they are slightly less expensive to send. Cards are often used to convey short messages, share memories of distinctive locations, or advertise events. Postcards differ from postal cards—the latter refers to those “special” cards issued by the postal service with the “stamp” already in place. Only the post office can issue postal cards. During the first four decades of the twentieth century, postcards cost a penny to mail, and were often called “penny postcards.”

While a few postcards were issued during the nineteenth century, it was not until the United States Congress passed the Private Mailing Card Act of May 19, 1898, that private individuals, companies, vacation destinations, and ecclesiastical organizations were permitted to print and distribute postcards. Previously, the United States Post Office held the monopoly. The heyday of the postcard was between 1900 and 1945, and one has only to type “postcard” into eBay.com to locate tens of thousands of cards, covering every imaginable topic the world over. Postcards are inexpensive, highly collectable, and an entire subculture has evolved around them at “swap meets” and shows of ephemera. The research value of old cards is that the subject matter may have changed or disappeared,⁴ and the images they display are often not found elsewhere. Stated directly, postcards are primary source documents.

There were several types of postcards. The earliest, published during the period 1900 to 1910, had a small black and white image on the front, surrounded by a white border. The address was written on the back, and if a message was included, it had to be written on the front of the card beside the image. In March 1907, the “divided back” was unveiled. This allowed for the message and the address to be written on the back, but freed the entire front of the card for the image. By 1910, postcards began to be published in color and were immediately mass-produced in huge quantities. About 1930, “linen” post cards first appeared. Those were printed on card stock with high-rag content, but the pressing of a machine gave the impression that the image was printed on linen. The most desirable cards dating from the first decades of the twentieth century were actual photographs, published on photographic paper. Those cards frequently carry high-quality images in keen focus and are eagerly sought by collectors. The final type, called the “chrome” postcard, came into circulation about 1950. They are published from a color photograph and have a shiny, glossy finish. Chrome cards are the type most often found today in souvenir shops.⁵

There are many ways to identify and date postcards. Some images are fully identified on the card itself. Other clues may be deduced from the postmark, since a card was often mailed from its place of origin and a date usually accompanies the postmark. Obviously, the card must pre-date the postmark. Moreover, the image may offer clues to identify the card. Many of the pipe organs pictured on postcards during the first decades of the twentieth century were new when the cards were issued. Organs were expensive, and some organ cards were produced immediately after a new instrument was installed. A few cards actually declare: “Our new pipe organ!” Finally, the style of the stamp may help to narrow the date if the postmark is either faint or incomplete. The post office redesigned stamps every few years. The older cards usually have a one-cent “Franklin,” while by the second decade of the twentieth century it was a one-cent “Washington.”

American organbuilders soon realized the reward of using postcards for promotion. The Estey Organ Co. in Brattleboro, Vermont, the Votteler-Hettche Organ Co. in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Wicks Organ Co. in Highland, Illinois (among others), distributed organ postcards. They were an inexpensive way to advertise recent installations and simultaneously impressed prospective customers. Estey was especially prolific with this method of marketing: several dozen organ cards issued by the firm have been gathered over the years. Sometimes those cards represent an important historical record because the organs they illustrate are now lost to history.

Some postcard organs are well known. This card (Illustration 1) was mailed from New York City to West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on April 20, 1929, and shows the interior of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine at 110th Street in New York City. The organ, Ernest M. Skinner Company Opus 150, completed in 1910, is a huge, four-manual instrument of some 150 ranks⁶ and was dedicated by Clarence Dickinson (1873–1969) in April 1911. Since the card was issued, the organ has been renovated several times, notably under the direction of Ernest M. Skinner & Son in 1939, and by G. Donald Harrison (1889–1956) in 1953.⁷ The organ was restored in 2008 by Quimby Pipe Organs, Inc., of Warrensburg, Missouri.⁸ This spectacular vista, photographed from high in the cathedral, looks down at the chancel and choir. It shows the Skinner organ located on opposite sides of the chancel at the triforium level and provides a vivid impression of the enormity of the space.

Another famous postcard organ (Illustration 2) is the Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. A large, four-manual instrument built by the Hutchings-Votey Organ Co. of Boston, the organ was opened on June 20, 1903, by a triumvirate of prominent organists: Henry Benjamin Jepson, Yale University; Wallace Goodrich, Trinity Episcopal Church, Boston; and Gaston M. Dethier, St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, New York City.⁹ The organ had an early type of electro-pneumatic action designed by Hutchings employee Harry F. Van Wart. The success of the instrument earned its maker, Geo. S. Hutchings (1835–1913), an honorary Master of Arts degree from the university. The card was mailed from New Haven to Springfield Gardens, Long Island, New York, on September 10, 1910, only seven years after the organ was built. In 1915, the organ was greatly enlarged and renovated by the J. W. Steere & Son Organ Co. of Springfield, Massachusetts,¹⁰ and again in 1928 by the Skinner Organ Company.¹¹ This circa 1908 postcard shows the original organ case before it was reworked in 1928.¹²

A few postcard organs (Illustration 3) had grandiose cases! This elegant example was mailed from Richmond, Virginia, to Lena, Indiana, on November 7, 1909, and shows a major, three-manual organ in the Catholic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. It was built by John Brown (1851–1912) of Wilmington, Delaware, who opened his organ shop in 1887.¹³ Brown, an Englishman by birth, was in business for some twenty-five years and built many organs for congregations in the middle-Atlantic and southern United States. Located in the cathedral’s gallery with an opulent fan of radiating trumpet pipes, the case is reminiscent of the 1869 Geo. Jardine & Son organ at St. George’s Episcopal Church, Stuyvesant Square, New York City. Completed in August 1906, the Brown organ is described in detail in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, but its tubular-pneumatic playing action proved problematic.¹⁴ Only six years later, the organ was rebuilt by M. P. Möller as their Opus 1334, 1912, and the action was converted to electro-pneumatic. Later still, the organ was rebuilt again by the Tellers Organ Co. of Erie, Pennsylvania, and today, almost nothing of the original 1906 organ remains except for the front pipes. Noted historian Donald R. Traser wrote in 2002 that the organ was considered by Mr. Brown to be his masterpiece!¹⁵ 

Some postcards show organs installed decades before. This card (Illustration 4), sent from South Hadley to Charlemont, both in Massachusetts, was mailed on October 6, 1910. It shows the interior of the Old South Church in Boston. Visible in the gallery is an 1822, two-manual organ by Thomas Elliot (1759?–1832), built in London. Henry Corrie (1786–1858), an English organbuilder, accompanied the instrument “across the pond” to superintend its installation.¹⁶ Following its opening on November 22, 1822, Corrie remained in Boston. After working briefly for Thomas Appleton (1785–1872), he settled in Philadelphia and became the leading maker of organs in that city between 1826 and 1850.¹⁷ The Old South organ was rebuilt by E. & G. G. Hook as their Opus 246, 1859, and the projecting keydesk, shown in the card, is the product of their renovation.¹⁸ An organ from the 1820s would have had a recessed keydesk with stopknobs arranged in vertical columns at the sides. The “new” Old South Church on Boylston Street had a three-manual organ by Hutchings, Plaisted & Co., Opus 58, 1875, and later still, a four-manual organ by Ernest M. Skinner Company, Opus 231, 1915. In 1876, the 1822 Elliot organ was moved second-hand to St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Milford, Massachusetts, where it survived until it was broken up for parts about 1955.¹⁹

A circa 1910 card shows a handsome 1872 instrument (Illustration 5) in the front of the Washington Street Methodist Episcopal Church in Petersburg, Virginia.²⁰ The maker of the organ is unconfirmed, yet it appears to be the work of Geo. Stevens (1803–1894) of East Cambridge, Massachusetts. The case bears astonishing resemblance to the 1871 Stevens organ in the First Congregational Church, Rindge, New Hampshire.²¹ Stevens had worked for William Goodrich (1777–1833) and following the latter’s death, set up shop in partnership with William Gayetty (d. 1839). Stevens’s organs were characterized by fine workmanship and stately cases. Stevens built another organ for a Virginia client in 1861: a two-manual instrument for the Broad Street Methodist Episcopal Church in Richmond, installed just as the Civil War began.²² The Petersburg organ remained until it was replaced with a two-manual organ by the Estey Organ Co., Opus 1205, 1913, of Brattleboro, Vermont.

Yet another card shows the sumptuous interior of Trinity Church, Episcopal, in Watertown, New York, with its elaborate Gothic tracery. The organ (Illustration 6) is Johnson & Son Opus 856, 1898, a three-manual organ with thirty registers built in Westfield, Massachusetts.²³ Visible in the image is a reversed console with the organ installed in a right-hand chamber beside the chancel. The installation was completed on March 29 and the organ was first used on Easter Day, 1898. It was later replaced by Skinner Organ Company Opus 457, 1924, and was moved second-hand to the Adirondack Community Church in Lake Placid, New York, where it was installed by Buhl & Blashfield, a Utica, New York, firm.²⁴ Johnson & Son organs were of superb quality and were among the finer organs built in nineteenth-century America.

Three postcard organs were promotional materials issued by well-known American firms. The first (Illustration 7) was built by the Wicks Organ Co., Opus 8, 1909, for the German Ev. St. Petri Church, Okawville, Illinois. The second (Illustration 8) was the work of Votteler-Hettche of Cleveland, Ohio, and was installed in the First Methodist Episcopal Church, Petoskey, Michigan. The third instrument (Illustration 9) was built by the Estey Organ Co., Opus 505, 1907, a two-manual organ for the First Congregational Church, Chelsea, Massachusetts.

University organs are also occasionally represented. This card shows the interior of the auditorium at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana. The organ (Illustration 10), built in 1907 by W. W. Kimball of Chicago, Illinois, was a gift of the alumni and was a large two-manual instrument with tubular-pneumatic action. The card was mailed from Valparaiso to Bridgeport, Connecticut, on October 5, 1911, and the message reads in part: “We attend chapel exercises in this place at 8:30 every morning. I have only missed two mornings as yet. We are nicely settled and like it very much.” The large piano on the stage looks like the work of Steinway & Sons! The Kimball organ was rebuilt by Hillgreen-Lane & Co. of Alliance, Ohio, in 1947 and was unfortunately destroyed with the building by fire on November 27, 1956.²⁵

Occasionally, a postcard showing an organ was distributed for parochial purposes. This handsome card (Illustration 11) from the First Reformed Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, reminded recipients that a “Sunday School Rally Service” was to be held on Sunday, October 7, 1906, at 2 p.m. The organ in the image was dedicated by the noted blind organist, David D. Wood of Philadelphia, on Thursday evening, October 22, 1891.²⁶ It was built by John W. Otto (1846–1892) of Baltimore, had two manuals and pedals, and cost $1,600.27. Otto was the brother of Louise Pomplitz (1836–1924), and at one time worked for the better-known firm, the Pomplitz Church Organ Co.

A postcard mailed from Port Huron, Michigan, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1913, is a fine example of a photographic card. The organ (Illustration 12), built by Hillgreen, Lane & Co., Opus 24, 1901, is an early instrument from the firm. The company was the partnership of Alfred Hillgreen (1859–1923), a Swedish immigrant, and Charles Alva Lane (1854–1933). Ultimately, three generations of the Hillgreen family built organs in Alliance, Ohio, between 1898 and 1973. The case shown here is unusually elegant and looks splendid in this turn-of-the century edifice. Note, in addition to the Methodist communion rail, that the choir has seating for almost fifty singers. That is a luxury not many of us enjoy today. The organ had two manuals with “pneumatic couplers”²⁸ and was opened in recital by a Mr. N. Crawthorne and other artists on Friday evening, July 26, 1901.²⁹

Another photographic card shows an organ (Illustration 13) in the Presbyterian Church of Pawnee City, Nebraska. Built in 1908 by the Hinners Organ Co. of Pekin, Illinois, the Hinners list states that the organ had nine registers. The Hinners Co. was known for its catalog organs. A congregation could order an organ through the mail, and the purchase included a set of directions so a member of the congregation could set up the organ! Many Hinners organs were located in rural locations in the Northern Plains, particularly in Nebraska and the Dakotas.³⁰ 

A third photographic postcard mailed from King Ferry, New York, on November 24, 1916, shows an organ (Illustration 14) in the Presbyterian Church built by Clarence E. Morey (1872–1935) of Utica, New York. The small, two-manual organ, his Opus 247, 1907, is recessed into an alcove at the front of the room, behind a raised pulpit platform. Visible in the cleanly focused image are only six stopknobs. Morey worked in Utica until his death in 1935³¹ and built several hundred small organs for the rural churches of Upstate New York. His organs were well built, durable, and many still serve their congregations today after a century of use.³²

Plenty of postcard organs are unidentified. Three interesting cards (Illustrations 15, 16, and 17) were never mailed and have no postmark or stamp. There is no indentifying information. If any reader of The Diapason recognizes any of those organs, the editor would be pleased to receive a letter with the details. Currently the largest collection of organ postcards is held by the Library and Archives of the Organ Historical Society at Stoneleigh in Villanova, Pennsylvania. The archivist there, Dr. Bynum Petty, would be pleased to receive donations of new cards.

Modern scholars and historians have had a tendency to dismiss postcards as trivial, but they remain a significant—and largely untapped—source of information for the study of early twentieth-century American pipe organs. For the evolution of case designs, they are essential. It is only by placing these images side by side that perceptive historians can note the common traits and the progression of style. The next time you pass a shoebox of old postcards in an antique or book store, take a moment to thumb through them. You might find the unique image of an old American pipe organ that is long gone.

Notes

1. Deltiology is the formal word for the collecting and study of postcards. Its etymology is two Greek words: deltion, a small writing tablet, and logy, to hew or to study. The word was first recognized by Merriam-Webster about 1965.

2. William T. Van Pelt, “Post Card Organs,” The Tracker, vol. 28, no. 3 (1984): 21–26.

3. Ibid. 

4. Maurice Rickards, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian, s.v. “Postcards” (New York: Routledge, [c. 2001]): 249–50.

5. Ibid.

6. “Notes About Town. The new organ of the cathedral . . .,” The New York Age, vol. 24, no. 15 (January 12, 1911): 4.

7. The Great Organ at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine—Description, History, Condition—A Plan for Restoration ([New York, New York:], Cathedral of St. John the Divine, [1992]). 

8. Michael Quimby, John L. Speller, Douglass Hunt, and Eric Johnson, “Cover Feature. Resurgence of a Landmark Instrument. The Restoration of the Great Organ in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City,” The American Organist, vol. 43, no. 11 (November 2009): 40–43.

9. Edward W. Flint, The Newberry Memorial Organ at Yale University: A Study in the History of American Organ Building (New Haven: Yale University Press; and London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 19; hereafter, Flint; and Joseph F. Dzeda, “Cover Feature. Newberry Organ Restoration Nears Completion,” The Diapason, vol. 107, no. 11 (November 2016): 26–28.

10. “Firm Rebuilding Big Yale Organ,” The Springfield (Massachusetts) Union, vol. 52, no. 307 (November 6, 1915): 3.

11. “Skinner Organ for Woolsey Hall, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.,” Stop, Open and Reed, vol. 5, no. 1 (September 1929): 18–19.

12. Flint, frontispiece.

13. “A Busy Organ-Tuner,” Wilmington (Delaware) Daily Republican, vol. 18, no. 95 (April 9, 1887): 1.

14. “Organ Specially Designed,” The (Richmond, Virginia) Times-Dispatch, No. 17,361 (October 28, 1906): 6; and “View in New Cathedral Showing Great Organ,” TD, No. 17,545 (April 29, 1907): 8.

15. Donald R. Traser, The Organ in Richmond: A History of the Organs, Organists, and Organ Music in Richmond, Virginia, from 1816 to 2001 (Richmond, Virginia: Richmond Chapter, American Guild of Organists. 2001): 92–94.

16. Hamilton Andrews Hill, History of the Old South Church (Third Church) Boston, 1669–1884 (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890): 446–81.

17. Stephen L. Pinel, “Late from London: Henry Corrie, Organbuilder, and His Family,” The Tracker, vol. 40, no. 4 (1996): 11–23.

18. “Old South Church Organ,” Boston (Massachusetts) Evening Transcript, vol. 30, no. 8,839 (March 26, 1859): 1; and “New Organ at the Old South Church,” (Boston) Daily Evening Traveller [sic], vol. 3, no. 180 (May 2, 1859): 2.

19. “Letters to the Editor,” The Tracker, vol. 14, no. 2 (Winter 1970): 17. 

20. “New Organ Arrived,” The Petersburg (Virginia) Index, vol. 14, no. 31 (October 8, 1872): 5.

21. Organ Historical Society, Organ Handbook (1974): 44–45.

22. “Broad Street M. E. Church,” (Richmond, Virginia) Daily Dispatch, vol. 19, no. 57 (March 19, 1861): 2.

23. John Van Varick Elsworth, The Johnson Organs: The Story of One of Our Famous American Organ Builders (Harrisville, New Hampshire: The Boston Organ Club Chapter of the Organ Historical Society, 1984): 151.

24. Scot L. Huntington, Barbara Owen, Stephen L. Pinel, and Martin R. Walsh, Johnson Organs 1844–1898: A Documentary Issued on the 200th Anniversary of his Birth (Cranbury, New Jersey: The Princeton Academy of the Arts, Culture, and Society, 2015): 150.

25. Organ Historical Society, Organ Handbook (2002): 101.

26. “Organ Recital,” Carlisle (Pennsylvania) Daily Herald, vol. 6, no. 29 (October 23, 1891): 1.

27. “The Organ Accepted,” Carlisle (Pennsylvania) Weekly Herald, vol. 91, no. 42 (October 15, 1891): 3. 

28. “The McCormick Memorial: Fine New Organ First Heard in a Recital Friday Evening,” Port Huron (Michigan) Daily Times, vol. 30 (July 27, 1901): 5.

29. “First Recital on the Organ: Affair at the Methodist Church Last Night was a Great Success,” The (Port Huron, Michigan) Daily Herald, No. 305 (July 27, 1901): 3.

30. Allison Alcorn-Oppedahl, “A History of the Hinners Organ Company of Pekin, Illinois,” The Tracker, vol. 44, no. 3 (2000): 13–25. 

31. “Death Claims C. E. Morey, 63, Organbuilder,” Utica (New York) Observer Dispatch, vol. 14, no. 51 (June 21, 1935): 23; and “C. E. Morey, 63, Succumbs Here,” Utica Daily Press, vol. 54, no. 87 (June 21, 1935): 4.

32. T. L. Finch, “Organ Building in Upstate New York in the Nineteenth Century,” The Bicentennial Tracker (1976): 68–69.

Photo: Illustration 1: the interior of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City, and Ernest M. Skinner Company Opus 150, completed in 1910 (All cards that accompany this article are from the author’s collection)