Identifying and Dating Hook & Hastings Organs

An original nameplate is the strongest single piece of name-form evidence an instrument can offer, because it records the style the firm put on its own work. The Museum of Ventura County reports that an 1869 organ at the Church of the Epiphany was identified through the E. & G. G. Hook nameplate on its console, and that the plate’s number matched the firm’s own numbering as the 505th organ the Hook brothers produced. That is the straightforward case: a plate in the earlier style, on an instrument dated before any published partnership year that would change the style, agreeing with the opus sequence.

Where a plate sits is builder-, era-, and instrument-specific, so the absence of a plate from the console proves nothing by itself. The Ventura instrument documents one console plate on one 1869 E. & G. G. Hook organ; that single placement does not establish a rule for the firm’s output as a whole, and no single instruction covers even the two builders for which placements are documented, let alone every builder. Look for markings without assuming where a Hook plate or number should be.

A plate can also carry the earlier style on an instrument that a later observer assigns to the Hastings period. A record for E. & G. G. Hook Opus 582, dated 1871 in the record and presented through a third-party front end to the OHS Pipe Organ Database, carries notes credited to Scot Huntington from a 1980 refurbishment that attribute the instrument’s character to Hastings’s influence ‘despite older nameplate usage’. That is one instrument and one practitioner’s observation, transcribed into a user-contributed record; it describes no class of Hook instruments. What it does show is that inside the transition window a nameplate and a third party’s era judgment can point to different styles, and the plate is evidence the firm produced while the judgment is not.

A database entry or an award citation records what its compiler wrote, not what the firm called itself when the instrument was built. The Organ Historical Society’s own Historic Organ Citations table records citation 407, awarded in October 2011 to Trinity United Presbyterian Church in Kenton, Ohio, with the builder given as ‘Hook & Hastings’ for an instrument dated 1861, although the earliest year any published chronology gives for a firm style that includes Hastings is 1870, and the earliest for his partnership is 1865. The listing may have an innocent explanation: an instrument relocated and recorded under the firm that installed it, a later rebuild by the firm under its later name, or a compiler’s shorthand. It is an observed inconsistency in a list, not an error proven against the instrument, and the current citations table and the Pipe Organ Database entry for that instrument should be checked before the observation is repeated.

The rule that follows is that a later name form in a database, an award citation, or a parish note does not establish the style in use when the instrument was built. Use the label as a pointer to the instrument, then look for the build-date evidence that decides the form.

The most repeated position puts the partnership and the enlarged name in 1870. The Diapason states that Frank Hastings joined the firm as a draftsman in 1855 and became a partner in 1870, when the Hook brothers were in their sixties, and gives E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings as the firm’s style from 1870 to 1881. The Peabody Essex Museum’s finding aid for the firm’s records agrees on both years: Hastings joined in 1855 and became a partner in 1870, ‘after which it operated as E. & G.G. Hook & Hastings’. The Organ Historical Society’s narrative history says the same in sequence rather than by year: after 1870 the firm was known first as E. & G. G. Hook and Hastings and later, after the deaths of both Elias and George Hook, as Hook & Hastings.

A separate Organ Historical Society catalog note places the change later and less precisely: ‘By 1872, Francis H. Hastings had become a partner, and the corporate name was changed to E. & G.G. Hook & Hastings.’ The note is a cataloger’s summary drawing on secondary literature, and ‘corporate name’ is the cataloger’s phrasing for a partnership style rather than evidence that the firm incorporated. The same note says the name was shortened to Hook & Hastings after the founders’ deaths in 1880 and 1881, without giving a year.

For the final style, The Diapason gives a year the other sources do not: after the brothers’ deaths, Hastings relocated operations and reorganized the company in 1893, and the column dates Hook & Hastings Company from 1893 to 1937. The column does not reproduce incorporation papers, and its own date ranges leave 1881 to 1893 assigned to no style at all. Under every one of these accounts the founding style, the enlarged partnership style, and the company style are different eras of one firm, and Hastings’s control of the firm after the founders’ deaths is not in dispute among them.

Historic New England’s collection record, drawing on J. Bishop’s article in The Organ: An Encyclopedia (2006), gives an earlier account on every point. In that account the Hook brothers promoted their former apprentice Francis ‘Frank’ Hastings to partner in 1865, ‘the company’s name was formally changed to Hook & Hastings Company in 1871′, and Hastings took full control after the brothers’ deaths in 1880 and 1881. Set against The Diapason, that is five years earlier for the partnership and more than twenty years earlier for the company style, and it names the 1871 change as a move directly to the shortened form rather than to E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings.

‘Formally changed’ implies a filed instrument, but the record cites none; it is a cataloger’s biographical note drawn from one encyclopedia article. It is presented here as a published position of equal standing with the others, not as a correction of them. The two institutional accounts also differ on the year the shop moved from Salem to Boston, 1831 in the Organ Historical Society’s accounts and 1832 in the Bishop account, which is a reminder that the disagreement runs through the whole chronology rather than through one date.

A piece of the firm’s own printed matter bounds the question from the other side. The American Antiquarian Society catalogs a trade item titled ‘Description of the grand organ, exhibited at the International Exhibition … by E. & G.G. Hook & Hastings, Boston, Mass.’ with a publication date of 1871. On that catalog date, the enlarged style was in printed use by 1871, which agrees with the 1870 position, is consistent with ‘by 1872’, and leaves open whether the Bishop account’s 1871 change describes the same event under a different name.

What the imprint cannot do is settle the formal change. The 1871 date is the catalog’s publication date for a piece of ephemera, and a dated use of a name in print shows when the name was in use; it does not show when any partnership or corporate instrument took effect. The supportable public statement is therefore this: E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings was in printed use by 1871; published chronologies place the partnership between 1865 and 1872 and the enlarged name between 1870 and 1872; one published chronology places a formal change to Hook & Hastings Company in 1871 and another places the reorganization in 1893.

Sources give 1827 or 1829, and the two may date different events. The Peabody Essex Museum’s finding aid states that the firm was established in 1827 by Elias and George Greenleaf Hook; the Organ Historical Society’s narrative history says the brothers opened their own shop in 1827, its catalog note for a Hook collection gives 1827 as the founding of the partnership, and Historic New England’s record, following Bishop, also gives 1827. The Diapason instead states that the brothers built their first organ together in 1829 and dates E. & G. G. Hook from that year. A shop opened in 1827 and a first organ completed in 1829 do not contradict each other, but no source says that this is the explanation, so the supportable form is ‘1827 (establishment: Peabody Essex Museum; Organ Historical Society; Historic New England) or 1829 (first organ: The Diapason)’.

The same uncertainty shows in the operating span attached to the firm’s widely repeated total of 2,614 instruments. The Diapason gives 110 years, the Weston Historical Society gives 108 years and calls the total an estimate, and the Organ Historical Society’s catalog description of the published Hook opus list gives 1827 to 1935, a span of 109 years. The total is stable across these sources and appears to derive from the published list; the span moves because the founding and closing dates do.

Published end dates for the firm run from 1929 to 1937, and they may not be dating the same event. The Organ Clearing House states that the Weston factory was demolished after the company closed in 1929. The Diapason states that Anna Hastings closed its doors in 1935 and that the company was dissolved in April 1937; the Organ Historical Society’s catalog note says the firm produced organs at Kendal Green until 1935, when its assets were dispersed. The Peabody Essex Museum’s finding aid says the firm survived until 1936, an Organ Historical Society history page says it closed in 1936, and Historic New England, following Bishop, says it continued building at a much slower pace until it closed in 1936.

Ceasing to build, ceasing to trade, formal dissolution, and demolition of the factory are four different events, and the spread of dates would be unremarkable if each source were dating a different one. None of them says which, so the set stands as a recorded conflict: 1929 (Organ Clearing House), 1935 (The Diapason; Organ Historical Society catalog note), 1936 (Peabody Essex Museum; Organ Historical Society; Historic New England after Bishop), and dissolution in April 1937 (The Diapason). Do not compress the set into a range, which would imply one event spanning eight years.

The published Hook opus list treats the output of all three styles as one numbered series. The Organ Historical Society’s catalog describes The Hook Opus List (Van Pelt, 1991) as documenting 2,614 organs built between 1827 and 1935 by E. & G. G. Hook, E. & G. G. Hook and Hastings, and Hook and Hastings in a single list. An opus number therefore does not by itself tell you which style the instrument was built under; it places the instrument in a sequence that runs straight across both changes of name.

Two limits go with that. The continuity is what the published list’s structure implies and what its catalog description states, not a statement in a company document that the sequence was deliberately carried on. And the list does not establish that no number was skipped, reused, or assigned to a contract that was never built, so a number’s position in the series is evidence about that number, not proof that its neighbors were built in order.

The numbering rate was too uneven for a number to be converted into a year by proportion. The Diapason records that the first 100 organs took from 1829 to 1856, that Opus 400 to Opus 500 were completed in three years, from 1866 to 1869, and that the peak year saw 55 organs built. A method that assumes a steady rate would place an early number decades wrong and a mid-century number years wrong, and it would do so with false precision.

The same three data points make the number useful in the other direction, though only for the years they actually state. The Diapason has the first hundred organs finished between 1829 and 1856, earlier than 1865, the earliest partnership year any published chronology gives, so a number inside that first hundred belongs to the founding style on every account. The same column puts Opus 400 to Opus 500 in 1866 to 1869, which is before the earliest year any chronology gives for the enlarged name and inside the years the partnership itself is disputed, so a number in that band has to take its style from the instrument’s own evidence rather than from its place in the sequence. Between and beyond those anchors the column gives no year, and an opus number alone fixes neither a build year nor a firm style.

Even with a number in hand, published build years for it can differ. The Tracker for October 1960 treats Opus 724 at the Congregational Church in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, as an instrument of 1878, while the Boston Organ Club Newsletter of March 1973 lists the same instrument, at the same church and with the same 1959 rebuild attribution, as Opus 724 of 1873. Both figures were obtained by automated extraction from scanned copies and should be confirmed against the printed originals before either is relied on; the case is offered as an example of a class of problem, not as a settled bibliographic finding.

The practical consequence is that a build year taken from one publication is an attributed year. State it with its source, and where a second publication gives a different year for the same number, state both.