Pipe Organ Database

Updated through online information from Scot Huntington. -- The information is from the church files (no longer extant), the local newspaper, and members of the church who remembered and/or pumped the organ. The organ was installed in September, 1893, and an engraved plaque indicated it was the gift of Mr. & Mrs. G.A. Burdick in memory of their son Milo, and cost $1,000. In 1963, it was replaced with the three-manual ca. 1923 Moller from Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY.

The G&B organ was hand pumped until 1929 when it received an electric blower. The organ was installed in a chamber front and center, and had a three-section facade 5-9-5 decorated in shades of brown and beige, with stenciled designs and cigar banding in shades of brown, gold, ivory, and black. In 1959, the organist of the church, David N. Johnson (then chair of the music department and organ instructor at nearby Alfred University), added or replaced something with a two-rank mixture, and may have made additional tonal alterations in an effort to make the organ more suitable for baroque music. The effort was described as "not entirely successful."

When the organ was removed in the fall of 1963, it was sold or given to 19 year-old Elbert VanDruff Jr. of Niles Hill in nearby Wellsville, NY, who installed the organ in the family barn. It was reported to me in 1976 by a nearby resident, that the dismantled organ had been stored in a barn he had purchased some years earlier, and that building burned to the ground with the organ and contents in a fire of suspicious origins, ca. 1973.

[Has 1962 Moller?]. 1966 NY list shows as altered. There is a Union Presbyterian at 15 Main St.