W. W. Kimball Pipe Organs

Kimball reed organs, built from 1877 until the line ended in 1922, and Kimball pianos each carry their own serial series, and both series run well into six figures (the company’s reed-organ output alone is put at 403,390 instruments by the Kimball International article on Wikipedia). Kimball pipe organs were numbered in a separate opus series that reached the 7,000s by the late 1930s, so a pipe-organ opus number has at most four digits. A six-figure number should not be treated as a Kimball pipe-organ opus number; first establish what the marked component and number identify.

Number length alone does not identify every mark on an instrument, though. A pipe organ carries other numbers: part and patent numbers on magnets, blowers, and console hardware, and tags or pencil marks left by later service technicians. Where a number sits matters as much as how long it is. What the different number series look like, where the opus number is usually found, and how far an opus number can be trusted to date an instrument are covered in Identifying and Dating Kimball Pipe Organs.

Kimball electronic organs came after the pipe-organ department had closed and share the company’s name and corporate history, but use a different sound-producing technology. In 1959 the W. W. Kimball Company was bought by the Jasper Corporation of Jasper, Indiana, a television-cabinet maker, and piano production moved to West Baden Springs, Indiana. Frank Pugno’s history of Kimball organs on theatreorgans.com records that the firm was renamed the Kimball Piano and Organ Company in 1961, that its first electronic organs appeared that year using photo-electric cell tone generators and vacuum-tube amplification, and that electronic organ production ended in 1983. The company filed the mark KIMBALL AUTHENTIC PIPETONE for electric and electronic organs in 1963, so “Pipetone” on an instrument marks an electronic organ, not a pipe organ.

An instrument with tone generators, amplifiers, and loudspeakers is an electronic organ whatever the nameplate says, and none of the identification or restoration guidance for Kimball pipe organs applies to it.

Identifying and Dating Kimball Pipe Organs covers what a number on the instrument is, how cautiously an opus number can be used to date it, and which independent records can confirm a date or an original location.

Kimball Chests, Controls, and Restoration Decisions covers what Kimball built into its windchests, wind system, and consoles, how to tell original Kimball material from later replacement, what a control-system retrofit does and does not change, and what should be inspected and documented before a repair, restoration, or replacement decision.

The pipe-organ department was a small part of a large business, and the department’s dates are not the company’s dates. W. W. Kimball and Company began as a Chicago piano dealership in 1857 under William Wallace Kimball (1828–1904), started assembling its own reed organs in 1877, and opened a factory at 26th and Rockwell Streets making organs and pianos in the early 1880s. By the turn of the century the Chicago works employed about 1,500 people and turned out more than 13,000 pianos a year. None of those dates or figures concerns pipe organs: the factory and the workforce were overwhelmingly a piano and reed-organ operation, and the Encyclopedia of Chicago’s entry on the company describes that business without mentioning pipe organs at all.

Pipe-organ building begins in the record in 1890, when Kimball hired Frederic W. Hedgeland, an Englishman trained at his family’s organ works in London. That date comes from the Wikipedia article on Kimball International and is the earliest recorded point for the department; the sources do not name a first instrument or say that Hedgeland founded the department, so 1890 is best read as “from about then” rather than as a founding date. From then until 1942 the department remained inside the W. W. Kimball Company. It was never a separate firm.

The name most often attached to the department’s later work is Robert Pier Elliot (1871–1941). The contract for the 1924 Kimball at the Scottish Rite Cathedral in St. Louis, reproduced in the organbench.com monograph on that instrument, was countersigned by “Robert Elliot, Organ Department manager.” The Worcester Memorial Auditorium’s history of its 1933 Kimball describes that organ as R. P. Elliot’s conception of a classical instrument and names him as the company’s New York representative who helped plan it. His title differs between the two accounts, and neither is a corporate record, but together they place him in the department’s large concert and institutional work of the 1920s and 1930s. That matters when a design is credited to “Kimball”: for an instrument of that period, the tonal scheme may reflect Elliot’s thinking as much as any house style, as the Worcester page says of its own organ.

Kimball closed its pipe-organ department in 1942. The Diapason’s account of the restoration of Kimball Op. 7231 at St. John’s Cathedral, Denver, calls that 1938 organ the last major instrument built before Kimball “ceased organ-building operations in 1942 after the outbreak of World War II.”

How many pipe organs the department built is not settled. The Wikipedia article and the Worcester Memorial Auditorium’s page both give 7,326 by the 1942 closure. The St. Louis monograph, by contrast, states that over four thousand had been built by about 1930 with opus numbers already “well into the 7K range,” and it suggests that unused proposals may have been assigned opus numbers that were later discarded. The monograph also states that Kimball’s method of assigning opus numbers cannot be known and that total output remains unconfirmed. The 7,326 figure may be the highest opus number rather than a count of instruments, but no source says so. For an owner the practical point is that an opus number places an instrument in sequence and gives an approximate date; it does not by itself say how many organs came before it.

Kimball built church organs, large institutional and concert organs (the Scottish Rite Cathedral in St. Louis, Worcester Memorial Auditorium, the ballroom of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall), residence organs, and theatre organs. A feature documented in a concert organ, such as a particular chest type, console layout, or tonal scheme, should not be assumed in a small church organ of the same year, and a theatre organ’s unit chests and percussions have no bearing on a straight church instrument. When a published description of a Kimball is used to interpret another Kimball, match the class of instrument first.

Three statements recur in accounts of surviving Kimball instruments.

The organbench.com monograph on the 1924 St. Louis Kimball states that all Kimball organs built after 1918 used electro-pneumatic chests “similar to the pitman chest design.” That is a single source, and its hedge is part of the claim: the monograph says “similar to,” not identical, and does not describe the differences. Treat it as a reasonable expectation to confirm by inspection, not as a specification.

Several of the surviving large Kimballs are described by their owners as unaltered. Worcester Memorial Auditorium says its organ “has never been altered in any way,” and The Diapason describes the Denver cathedral Kimball as in “completely original condition (not a pipe has been changed).” Those statements are about design and pipework; they do not mean the leather, wiring, or action has never been touched.

Restorations of Kimballs follow a recognizable pattern. The Spencer Organ Company’s restoration of the Denver organ, begun in 2009, as reported in The Diapason, kept the pipework and mechanism and replaced leather, repaired and renewed action components, and cleaned and re-regulated the pipes. The Historic Organ Restoration Committee is carrying out similar work on the Kimball in Boardwalk Hall’s Adrian Phillips Ballroom. Separating original Kimball material from renewed material on a specific instrument, and deciding what a given organ needs, is the subject of Kimball Chests, Controls, and Restoration Decisions.

Two works go well beyond this overview. James W. Guyer’s 2016 Indiana University Doctor of Music final project, W. W. Kimball Company as Organ Builders: Their History, Instruments & Legacy, is available through the university’s ScholarWorks repository and covers Kimball church, school, college, and temple organs in Chicago, Denver, Columbus, and Pittsburgh, along with questions of renovation and restoration. The Design & History of the 1924 W. W. Kimball Masonic Pipe Organ KPO 6763 at Scottish Rite Cathedral, Saint Louis, Missouri, published on organbench.com, is a detailed account of one instrument, including its contract, and is the source for several of the statements above about opus numbers and chests. Neither is a company record; Kimball’s own organ-department records have not surfaced.