Pipe Organ Update

Progress on the assembly of our new pipe organ is proceeding smoothly and roughly on schedule. Our special thanks to our organ vendor Dave Cool of Temple Organs of St. Joseph, MO for the following information about the organ and its assembly.

The first photo, below, shows the Pedal Subbass rank of wood pipes (these are the yellow and dark brown pipes). These pipes are from a Moller pipe organ which were removed from a church in Fargo, ND.

The grey-painted expression boxes are from the same Moller Organ. The Moller Organ company began manufacturing pipe organs in 1875 and ceased business in 1992. It built over 11,000 organs which are found in many small to large venues, including for example, the Cadet Chapel of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. The shutter cabinets (in the photo below) will open and close for tonal expression of the pipes that will be inside each box. The right shutter has pipes of the "choir" division, played from the bottom of the three keyboards on the console. The left-hand shutter chamber has the pipes of the "swell" division, which is played from the top-most keyboard. The middle keyboard of the console will play pipes, not yet installed, in the unenclosed "great" division, located in front of the "swell" box.

The large and ornate casework that surrounds the working parts of the organ (shown below) was salvaged from St. Simeon's Episcopal Church in the Bronx, NY that was scheduled for demolition. There will be gold-painted decorative "facade" pipes around three sides of the organ which will hide all of the playing pipes, of which there will be approximately 1,400.