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A massive piece of Windsor history is floating away, across the Atlantic Ocean.
Carefully evicted from its longtime downtown home and with no takers found anywhere on this continent, a 10,000-pound Aeolian organ — the only one historically preserved and fully functional in Canada — is on its way to a museum in the Netherlands.
Since the mid-1940s, the enormous instrument was housed at Morris Sutton Funeral Home, owned by Arbor Memorial, on Giles Boulevard East. Over decades, it filled the Tudor-revival style building’s chapel with rich, dulcet tones.
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When Arbor Memorial sold the property earlier this year, it sought a new home for the 100-year-old organ with towering pipes. No one in North America stepped forward to accept the hefty 4.5-tonne musical gem.
“I couldn’t find anybody who wanted it,” said Ron Dossenbach, the person responsible for restoring and maintaining the organ, told the Star.
“The pipe organ culture has really descended, and continues to, in North America. We couldn’t find a place anywhere to put it.
“We looked and we asked everywhere.”
Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens told the Star the city had no place to house the instrument.
“They reached out to us and asked us if we had any city spot that would want an organ. We really don’t have a space for an organ of this size to be used,” Dilkens said.
Success came from across the pond when the Geelvinck Pianola Museum in Amsterdam eagerly agreed to display and play the organ, which is now packaged in pieces on an east-bound trans-Atlantic freighter.
“When we heard about the possible donation of the Aeolian pipe organ from Windsor, we were enthusiastic, because it was still in its original form, and still in playing condition,” Kasper Janse, Pianola Museum curator, said in an email to the Star.
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“We hope our visitors can step inside and not only see the construction, but also experience the vibrations of a great instrument like this, as if you stand as a director in front of your orchestra.”
We’ve lost a heritage treasure
The historic organ was the subject of two ElderCollege courses, during which participants saw the instrument up close and listened in “ecstasy” while Dossanbach played, said Lloyd Brown-John, founding director of Canterbury ElderCollege.
“I’m happy the organ has been saved, and I’m happy it found a new home, but I am extremely disappointed that the new home is not in Windsor or Essex County,” Brown-John told the Star.
“It was a fantastic organ. I thought it was, in fact, one of the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard, and it is leaving us.
“How it slipped through our fingers is beyond me. We’ve lost a heritage treasure.”
It took Dossenbach and neighbour Chuck LaForge nearly a month spanning parts of July and August to meticulously disassemble the organ and move its components into the funeral home’s large garage for transport.
They were able to carry most parts downstairs from the building’s second and third floors. A crane had to hoist the hefty wind chest through a hole in the building’s third storey, roughly nine metres high.
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“I was a little nervous. I did the rigging on it,” said Dossenbach, who is certified by the Royal Canadian College of Organists. “I’m thinking, what if I didn’t put the slings on this thing right? To see this expensive organ chest 30 feet up in the air was nerve-wracking.”
The organ boasts 1,280 wood or lead-and-tin pipes ranging from quite small to 17 feet long. They sprouted from an echo chamber behind the instrument and filled the building’s large third-storey attic and proved incredibly fragile to move, Dossenbach said. The duo managed to coax the longest pipe outside through the hole in the attic wall without damaging it.
“You can bend them like a tube of cardboard Christmas wrapping” if you’re not careful, he said.
He and LaForge constructed nearly 30 long and relatively flat trays to protect the pipes for transportation in shipping containers alongside the organ’s many other parts, which also include a harp (a xylophone-type device) and a set of chimes.
To get the large organ console out from the chapel’s second-storey balcony, they sawed into a narrow doorway and pushed it through. Then, they lowered the console through a large shaft once used to hoist funeral caskets from the first floor to the second for storage.
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Dossenbach’s relationship with the organ began in 2011, when he first performed at a Morris Sutton funeral on “some dodgy electronic piece” — an “awful” experience for pipe organists.
He was shown the Aeolian organ and learned it hadn’t worked for about a decade. He was hooked. Over the next six months, Dossenbach painstakingly brought it back to life.
“The beauty of it was that the organ was completely intact and original, but unaltered — it’s a huge thing of historical value. It totally sounds exactly how it did back in 1924,” he said.
The organ, which has a self-playing mechanism, was built a century ago this November — the last year the New York City-based Aeolian Company operated — for James Cooper, a Prohibition-era bootlegger. It was installed in his extravagant Walkerville home, Cooper Court, then the city’s largest house. He reportedly bought the instrument for $50,000 (more than $900,000 in today’s dollars).
Originally from London, Ont., Cooper died in 1931, reportedly by falling off a boat bound for Europe, though his body was never found. His family kept the organ until the Windsor home was torn down in 1946.
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That’s when Edwin Morris, starting his second funeral parlour, bought the organ for $2,500 and built a chapel around it at what became Morris Sutton Funeral Home.
Regular operations at the funeral home ceased at the start of this year, Scott Lockwood, general manager of community relations and growth for Arbor Memorial, told the Star. Pre-arranged funerals planned for that location are being transitioned and fulfilled at other Arbor Memorial Locations, including Janisse Funeral Home about two blocks away.
The company, he said, remains “committed to honouring Windsor’s rich cultural history.”
Finding the organ a new home at the Pianola Museum is “part of our commitment to preserving this legacy,” Lockwood said. There, “it will be exhibited for generations to come.”
Located in Amsterdam’s charming Jordaan neighbourhood, the Pianola Museum was founded in 1981 as a platform to preserve and present player pianos — self-playing instruments with pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanisms that operate with perforated paper or metal rolls. The museum is housed in a former police station and receives nearly 10,000 yearly visitors who, according to its website, “find themselves in a musical time machine.”
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Only about 20 of the 800-plus Aeolian organs ever built made it to Canada. The Cooper Aeolian is likely the only one sent west of Hamilton in Ontario.
In Europe, just a few dozen reed and pipe organs were installed, museum curator Janse said. Notably, Dutch merchant Julius Carl Bunge had an Aeolian organ installed in his 1910 mansion in the Netherlands — the largest privately owned house built in the country in the 20th century — and another in his 1922 home in Meggen, Switzerland.
When the Dutch home was demolished in 1980, the Pianola Museum saved most of that instrument from destruction. But the organ in the Meggen house was removed in 1950 and the museum hasn’t been able to find it.
The Aeolian organ from Windsor, Janse said, “is from the same period as the organ in Meggen and has nearly the same size.
“We hoped we could acquire this instrument for our museum to be placed at the rear end of our music room on the ground floor, recreating the situation that was in Meggen.
“The visitors of our museum can hear the music of this wonderful instrument in the same way as Mr. Bunge, and the original owner, Mr. Cooper did. This makes it possible for our visitors to step back in time, so they can imagine what a wonderful invention these instruments were for the music lover of the early 20th century.”
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To make space for the organ chamber and most of the organ’s components, the museum has altered a former workshop space in the building’s rear, he said. Three pipes or “stops” — the organ’s “echo chamber” — will run to the other end of the room.
They also updated the room’s walls and the roof for better temperature and humidity control, Janse said.
It will take “many months” to fully install the organ at the museum, which is largely self-supporting and run mostly by volunteers, he said. The display will include information about the organ’s Windsor history.
As for the former Morris Sutton Funeral Home at 68 Giles Boulevard East, the City of Windsor has purchased the property for $2.2 million with plans to tear it down and eventually build a replacement for the current Windsor Fire and Rescue Services headquarters and Station 1.
Windsor’s historic Aeolian organ will live, however, just on a different continent.
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“I’m almost happy to see it go,” said Windsor’s Dossenbach, though he admitted shipping the organ off felt like saying goodbye to a family member.
“I dare say more Canadians will see it there (at the museum) than ever could have here. The organ’s story will continue.”
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