J. H. & C. S. Odell Organs

The firm’s history page says the Odells built more than 500 organs at the West 42nd Street works and were turning out ten to twelve a year by 1870, competing with the established New York builders. Wikipedia’s article on the firm puts the opus list at more than 580 by January 1928, when the firm signed a contract for a new factory in Mount Vernon. Odell instruments went into many of the city’s major churches, among them St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Bartholomew’s, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, Marble Collegiate, St. Charles Borromeo and St. Michael’s on 34th Street. The best-known survivor is Opus 190 of 1881, a three-manual, 45-stop organ at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Troy, New York, which the firm describes as the only extant nineteenth-century concert-hall organ in the country.

The firm’s own pages give 1927 in one place and 1928 in another for the move to Westchester; use those dates as an approximate workshop transition and check instrument-specific records for work near that period.

After the Mount Vernon factory, Wikipedia records the firm operating from a two-floor shop on Morningside Avenue in Yonkers in the years before the Second World War. Output was far smaller than in the nineteenth century: the total for the whole New York and Westchester period is a little over 640 organs, so on those figures the Westchester works accounts for roughly sixty new instruments over more than fifty years, alongside rebuilding and service work in the New York area.

The end of this era is dated differently by the firm’s own two history pages. One says the firm remained active in the greater New York area until 1983. The other says it was active well into the 1970s and that, after the death of William H. Odell, then principal, in 1979, the family decided to dissolve the firm once obligations to existing clients were complete. Wikipedia, whose account carries no footnotes, adds that the family proprietorship was reorganized as a corporation in the early 1980s, that the corporation was dissolved in 1983 and its major assets sold, and that a small roster of service clients was kept on afterward. Read together, these describe a wind-down between 1979 and 1983 rather than a contradiction, but only the firm’s statements come from the firm itself.

Neither of the firm’s history pages says what happened to the business between the early 1980s and its Connecticut revival. Wikipedia reports that title to the firm passed from Harry Odell to his eldest son Edward in 1993, that Edward worked for Austin Organs in Hartford for seven years, the last three as console department foreman, and that in December 2002 he left Austin to make Odell a full-time concern. The firm’s page on Edward Odell confirms the Austin years (joining in 1996, foreman by 1999, leaving in 2002; its history page gives 1995 for the move to Connecticut) but not the 1993 transfer. A nameplate or service record from that interval should be matched to the instrument’s own history before assigning a type or date of work.

Two dates mark the revival, and they refer to different events. The Connecticut Secretary of the State’s registry records J.H. & C.S. ODELL, LLC as a domestic limited liability company registered on 1 June 1999, and the firm’s history page likewise says Edward Odell re-established the company in 1999. Full-time work in a dedicated shop began in 2002, after he left Austin Organs. The firm now describes a shop in East Haddam that does its own millwork, joinery, fabrication, voicing and finishing, and, by its own account unlike many firms today, casts its own pipe metal and makes its own pipes.

Recent opus numbers from this era include Opus 649 (2011), a two-manual electric-action organ with slider chests for the Congregational Church of Orange, Connecticut; Opus 651 (2013), a three-manual drawknob console for Norfolk Church of Christ Congregational; and Opus 653 (2014), a mechanical-action organ for the Chapel of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in New York City. The firm’s site does not state a total number of organs built or a current highest opus number.

Edward Odell is the firm’s principal and the only principal the Connecticut registry lists for the LLC. The firm describes him as a great-great grandson of co-founder Caleb Sherwood Odell who grew up accompanying family members on service calls around New York, studied at Auburn University, worked at Austin Organs from 1996 and became foreman there in 1999, and left in 2002 for the family firm. He is a Colleague member of the American Institute of Organbuilders, a membership category rather than a certification of the firm, and chaired its 2004 national convention.

The Diapason reported on 24 April 2015 that J. H. & C. S. Odell and Gawthrop Organworks had joined forces to create Odell Organs, headquartered in East Haddam, pairing Edward Odell’s drafting, chest design, mechanical action, pipe making and voicing with Bradley Gawthrop’s solid modeling, engraving and hand-tool work. That is the origin of the ‘Odell Organs’ name. The firm’s current history, biography, opus-list and home pages present the business as J.H. & C.S. Odell under Edward Odell and do not mention Gawthrop Organworks or Bradley Gawthrop, and Connecticut’s business registry showed no entity named ‘Odell Organs’ in September 2026. None of that shows whether the collaboration continues; a collaboration need not create a registered entity, and an undated website may simply not have been updated. If a contract, invoice or nameplate reads ‘Odell Organs’, match it to dated project records before associating it with the 2015 collaboration, and ask the firm about its present arrangement.