BRATTLEBORO — When the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church in San Francisco built a new sanctuary in 1928, the church signed a contract the next year with the Estey Organ Company of Brattleboro to build one. One year later, the assembly work on Estey Opus #2886 was completed, and it was dedicated on April 27, 1930.
At its dedication ceremony, the church elders said they hoped that the organ would enrich the church's music ministry to “cheer the hearts, and to kindle holy purpose.”
But the passing years took their toll on the organ and, nearly nine decades after it was built, it is in need of a thorough refurbishing.
Mary Morganti, a professional archivist and member of the Seventh Avenue congregation, volunteered to do the detective work for the church to track down information about the once-mighty organ.
Her search led her to the town where the Seventh Avenue pipe organ, and thousands of others, were built.
“Because I'm an archivist, I had a suspicion that the Brattleboro Historical Society might have the information,” she said.
Morganti's hunch was right. She learned that the company records about Opus #2882 still existed. The Brattleboro Historical Society and the Estey Organ Museum had them - along with the blueprints, wood samples, work orders, and correspondence - for nearly every pipe organ it built from 1904 to the 1950s.
“John Carnahan [of the Brattleboro Historical Society] sent me an inch-thick file of correspondence of the organ,” she said. “I was amazed that much documentation still existed.”
And that is why Morganti was now standing in the dusty upper floor of one of the surviving Estey Organ Company buildings, helping the historical society and the Estey museum organize some the voluminous files of the company, which operated from 1852 to 1960.
A little professional help
Last week, Morganti took a buswoman's holiday and came to town to help Estey Organ Museum volunteer Barbara George. She said she was going to be in the neighborhood, since she already planned to come to New England to visit a friend.
Morganti had spent much of her professional life as a archivist. After receiving her B.A. from California State College-Sonoma and her M.L.S. from the University of California at Berkeley, she worked as a manuscripts librarian at the California State Archives in San Francisco. She also held archival positions with Wells Fargo and the California Nurses Association.
In 1990, Morganti became the supervising archivist at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked processing hundreds of manuscript and archival collections and managing the work of others doing the same.
She left that position in 2001 to return to the California Historical Society to become its director of research collections, a post she held until her retirement in 2014.
As the two women were sorting through the numbered envelopes, cleaning off the dust, and placing them into archival boxes, Morganti said that what she and George were doing “was not anything like full preservation” of the Estey ephemera.
But George said this is the first real effort to organize the files.
Very few of the files were thrown away after the Estey company ceased operations on Birge Street in 1960, she said. All of them were stored on the upper floors of the Estey buildings, and most of them ended up in the hands of the Brattleboro Historical Society in the 1980s, along with dozens of old organs that were donated to the society over the years.
“What we have is a fantastic history of where the organs went and how they were installed,” said George. “The museum will benefit greatly from this.”
With the records organized and accessible, the museum will have full documentation of the stories behind the manufacturing, construction, delivery, and installation of these instruments.
“It adds more of a human touch,” George said.
A story in every envelope
The Estey Organ Company was once the leading organ manufacturer in the United States. Founded by Jacob Estey in 1852, it produced over the course of a century nearly 500,000 reed organs and more than 3,000 pipe organs at its factory complex on Birge Street.
The pipe organs were the best documented of the Estey products. Each one was numbered and information on every step, from purchase to transport to installation, was collected in a corresponding file.
Take Estey Opus #106, a pipe organ originally built for display for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Mo. It was sold to a San Francisco church a few months later.
On the brown paper envelope, in blue pencil, are the words “Burned at San Francisco, April 18, 1906” - the date of the massive earthquake and fire that ravaged the city and left more than 3,000 dead.
Or this note written on April 12, 1904 from E.E. Dudley from Central Baptist Church in Norfolk, Va., regarding the installation of Estey Opus #157.
“Allow me to say that I believe you know your business better than [the] architect or anyone else and I do not believe you will make a blunder and allow the organ to appear too low and flat for the width of it.”
“Tell Haskell I am depending on him,” Dudley wrote, referring to organ builder and inventor William E. Haskell, who was hired to head the pipe organ department in 1901.
Zion Lutheran Chruch in Waynesboro, Pa., was satisfied with the installation of Estey Opus #199 in May 1905. In a final report to Haskell, he was told the “case work & design all were very favorable.”
“It's really hard not to look inside every envelope,” said Morganti. “There are so many good stories here.”
As for the organ that inspired Morganti to come to Brattleboro, she said that restoration work on Estey Opus #2886 has now begun.
Interestingly, the same California company that originally installed the organ, Schoenstein & Co. Organ Builders, is handling the restoration. It is expected to cost nearly $200,000 to complete the work.
While she was drawn to the history of Estey organs, Morganti said that is the extent of her familiarity with the instruments.
“I sing in two choirs, but I'm not an organist,” she said.