St. Johns First Episcopal Church has a new organ with a unique history

LOGAN – St. Johns First Episcopal Church, located at 85 E. 100 N. in Logan, has a newly-renovated Aeolian-Skinner Organ console that at one time graced the New York Philharmonic Hall. The organ was played there from 1962 until 1976.

How the prized organ landed at the 150-year-old plus church in Logan is quite a journey.

After New York, the organ console went to Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in California for a time. 

Edwin Stafford, a professor of business at Utah State University, recognized the significant history of the organ.

“This organ was once the ‘house organ’ of the New York Philharmonic under conductors Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez in Philharmonic Hall from the 1960s and ’70s,” Stafford said. “It is featured in at least one famous Leonard Bernstein recording of Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’ and is featured in a 1972 Young Person’s Concert led by Bernstein that can be viewed on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a5m8sIm0cA.)”

After other stops along the way, the console was most recently acquired by dairyman Hal Stoddard of Hooper, who connected it to his collection of pipes in a barn dubbed the “Hoopernacle Organ.” He has given concerts for some 25 years for people in the area.

Having a pipe organ was a life-long dream of Stoddard. In the 1980s he purchased a small, used pipe organ, which he was going to put in his garage, but his garage was too small to house the organ and pipes it needed.

“I love playing the organ, and also having others come to see it, hear it, and play it,” Stoddard said on his blog. “My aim through my music is to bring honor and glory to our Heavenly Father and inspire and uplift all whose lives I touch.”

He had newspapers, trade magazines and television stations write stories about having a magnificent organ in his barn with chickens and cows and all they bring to it.

He put together Christmas and Halloween programs, invited speakers and filled the barn with organ music.

Jonathan Rose, the music director and organist for St. Johns, also works for Anderson Organ Works, owned by a fellow organist at the church. He maintained and tuned the Hoopernacle organ and became friends with the Stoddards.

Hal Stoddard passed in January 2024 and this wife Joyce called Rose and asked him if he knew anyone that would want the console. If he didn’t know of someone, they were going to haul it to the dump.

“She said her son wanted to turn the barn into a workshop,” he said. “I contacted Father Jason Samuel at St. John’s Episcopal Church and asked if I could bring the console to the church. He gave me the okay, so I brought it to Logan.”

He said it took him 10 months to put it back together.

“I just fished it a couple of weeks ago,” Rose said. “It has real ebony and ivory and with laws the way they are now, I can’t take ivory out of the state.”

He said most organs now days have plastic and no ivory on the stops and on the keys.

“I had to use an electrical panel to convert the sound to an amplifier because we had no bellows or pipes,” Rose, who graduated from Utah State University’s organ performance program, said. “I enjoy this kind of work. It’s like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle.”

The Aeolian-Skinner Organ console has four keyboards, most church organs have two rows of keyboards.

“I cleaned everything up and painted the organ using a Steinway black,” Rose said. “I worked on it while working my regular job.”

Father Samuel said he was not prepared for the way the organ came.

“Jonathan started unpacking the organ pieces and straw and hay was all over the place,” he said. “It was like wiring a house. He had wires everywhere, but it is a beautiful organ now.”

There are two organs in the sanctuary of the St. Johns First Episcopal Church and the black one with four keyboards is a standout piece.