Pipe Organs of Meadville

(This article originally appeared in the January 2019 edition of the church newsletter.)

From time to time someone will ask me how First Presbyterian’s pipe organ compares to others in Meadville, or how many are in town altogether. It’s an interesting topic: one can glean a great deal about a region’s economic and cultural history by investigating its pipe organs. (Actually, this might make a fruitful avenue of research for a school project!)

Most of Meadville’s churches did have a pipe organ, large or small, at one time. Pianos, being associated with saloons of ill repute, were deemed inappropriate for worship; harmoniums (pump organs) can’t muster enough volume to accompany a singing congregation of more than a few dozen. Thus, particularly after the end of the Civil War, pipe organ manufacturing was a booming business in America. Two now-defunct Erie companies, Felgemaker and Tellers, produced several thousand instruments between them, some of which ended up in Meadville. (Until the fire of 1970, our church had a Tellers organ with four keyboards.)

I can’t speak to the fate of every pipe organ in town, but many have been replaced with electronic substitutes over the years, including St. Brigid, Trinity Lutheran, and Ford Chapel. Stone Methodist bought an electronic in 1991, but a few pipes from the previous organ were retained and can be played alongside the computer-generated sounds. Of the pipe organs still intact, the Unitarian Church’s is notable: built in 1894 by George Hutchings of Boston, it is a masterpiece of mechanical craftsmanship. Sadly, years of neglected maintenance have left this modest-sized organ in an unusable state (though the congregation is interested in restoring it). St. Agatha has a more substantial instrument built by Tellers in the early 1900s. To my ears it has some gorgeous sounds, and benefits greatly from the building’s natural reverberation, but it too needs a major overhaul.

The two largest pipe organs in town are, of course, our 1972 Schlicker and the 1977 Austin at Christ Episcopal Church, which has the same number of keyboards but fewer pipes. Christ Church is notable for having pipes at both the front and rear of the building, offering the congregation a “surround sound” experience: an arrangement often found in large cathedrals but not so common in more modest-sized churches.

Not surprisingly, with the closure of several large factories in the 1980s, no pipe organs have been installed in Meadville since then — only electronics, which are certainly cheaper but not nearly as durable as pipes. Zooming out to the national level, there are still organbuilders crafting new instruments, though not on the scale of a hundred or even twenty years ago. In a sense, a pipe organ is an investment for the long haul: a barometer of a congregation’s confidence that their church will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. The congregations that now opt for them do so because they have thought long and hard about the purpose of their worship, and decided a pipe organ will enhance that worship — not simply because “we’re a church so we ought to”, as the thinking once was.

Kevin

(edit: the Organ Historical Society maintains a wonderful database [https://pipeorgandatabase.org/index.html] on which information about most of Meadville's current and former pipe organs can be found -- as well as virtually every other city and town in America!)