How to Identify and Date a Reuter Organ

Reuter-Schwarz and Reuter-Schwartz name the same company. The firm was founded in 1917 at Trenton, Illinois, as the Reuter-Schwarz Organ Company, and the founding partner’s surname is spelled Schwarz in the National Register of Historic Places registration form for the company’s Lawrence buildings and in the company’s own history, while tertiary references spell it Schwartz. The two spellings describe one firm at one period, not a Reuter-Schwarz company and a separate Reuter-Schwartz company.

Keep the spelling you find where you find it. A contract, a program or a database record that reads Schwartz is not wrong in a way that needs correcting, and correcting it can break a search. The Pipe Organ Database files the predecessor firm under the exact entity name The Reuter-Schwarz Organ Co., and the seven instrument records filed under that entity are reachable only under that name.

The Reuter-Schwarz name gave way to the Reuter Organ Company after the move from Trenton to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1919 and after Earl Schwarz left the partnership, but no source gives an exact date for either the departure or the rename. The company moved in 1919 on a commission for the Lawrence Masonic Temple, having shortlisted Lawrence, Lindsborg and Winfield, with University of Kansas piano faculty member Carl Preyer credited with persuading it to choose Lawrence. The Pipe Organ Database builder record for Reuter Organ Co., drawing on David H. Fox’s A Guide to North American Organbuilders, puts the establishment of the successor firm at Lawrence in 1920 on Schwarz’s withdrawal, while the same record’s structured Active field reads 1918.

The practical consequence is that the name on a contract does not switch cleanly with the move. Reuter-Schwarz contracts are recorded as late as 1920, so an instrument from 1919 or 1920 can carry either name, and the first organ built after the move, delivered on 24 May 1920 to Central Congregational Church in Topeka, Kansas, belongs to the Lawrence period whichever name its paperwork shows. The database’s predecessor entity describes its own span as Highland, Illinois, 1917 to 1919, and Lawrence, Kansas, 1919 to 1920, which differs from the Trenton location the National Register form and the company give; treat that note as the database’s own description and not as a correction of either.

Three details of the founding are disputed among the sources, and this page reports the accounts rather than settling them. The Kansas incorporation date is given as 15 September 1919 by the National Register registration form and as 5 September 1919 by Wikipedia; the form is a preservation document rather than the corporate filing itself, so September 1919 is as precise as the published evidence allows. The founding partnership is described by the company as Adolph Reuter and Earl Schwarz with six employees, by a published secondary account as A. C. Reuter, Earl Schwarz and Henry Jost, and by the National Register form as four founders including Albert G. Sabol Sr., whom Wikipedia treats instead as a founding employee who headed engineering and design. Each account stands here with its own authority, and none of them is averaged into a consensus.

A Reuter opus number places an instrument in one sequential series that the company, The Diapason, the Pipe Organ Database and owning institutions all use consistently, beginning with Opus 1 in 1917. Documented opus-and-year pairs run from Opus 1 in 1917 to Opus 2227 in 2006, and three anchors documented by the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas, Opus 1741 in 1970, Opus 2044 in 1982 and Opus 2179 in 1995, sit in the order a rising series predicts. A number between two anchors therefore gives an estimated year, but only an estimate: three points are consistent with a monotonic series without proving it gap-free or evenly spaced, and the year behind any one number is a matter of record rather than interpolation.

The series runs continuously through the firm’s changes of ownership and plant, so a number identifies a position in the sequence rather than an era of construction; only the year, the plant and the ownership together characterize the instrument, and the number alone does none of that.

The firm’s first instrument and the number it carries are described differently by the sources, and this page reports the accounts rather than choosing one. The company’s own history and The Diapason state that a two-manual organ of eight ranks or stops was built at Trenton for Trinity Episcopal Church in Mattoon, Illinois, and inaugurated on 18 November 1917; The Diapason’s centennial notice calls it Reuter Opus 1, its October 2017 cover feature calls it simply the first organ and assigns no number, and the company’s own account of its first instrument gives no opus number either. The Pipe Organ Database records the same Mattoon instrument as The Reuter-Schwarz Organ Co. Opus 2 of 1917, with eight ranks and 517 pipes, and carries a note added in August 2015 by contributor R. Joseph Wiessinger stating that Opus 1 did not burn as had been said but was destroyed at Trenton when a storm blew a factory wall in on it, after which Opus 2 was built and installed at Mattoon. Wikipedia likewise states that the first organ was damaged in the factory and that Opus 2 was delivered instead.

For an owner or a researcher the point is that a Mattoon reference to Opus 1 and a database record for Opus 2 describe the same organ, and that the commemorative plaque presented at the 2017 centennial went to the church’s music director as a gift and is not a builder’s plate fitted to the instrument. No church, contract or shop record has been consulted on the question, so it stays open.

A year attached to an opus number in a list or a database record cannot be assumed to be the installation year, and installation can follow the contract by more than a year. Reuter Opus 227 for Temple Beth Israel in Portland, Oregon, is recorded in a sample-set vendor’s instrument study, drawing on Organ Historical Society data and the notes of Michael Barnes, as contracted on 28 December 1926, scheduled for delivery in September 1927 and probably not installed until 1928, a spread of about a year and a quarter on one instrument. One case does not make a builder-wide rule, and the installation year here is stated as probable rather than documented, but it shows that the contract year, the scheduled year and the actual year can all differ. When a dedication program, a database year and a contract date disagree by a year or so, that is the expected shape of the evidence rather than a sign that one of them describes a different organ.

An opus number on its own does not establish who built the instrument in front of you, and it does not always point to one record. In the Pipe Organ Database a search on builder Reuter with opus 1368 returned four records as of September 2026, two of them rebuilds by other firms, Peragallo Opus 772 and Schantz Opus 2197, whose only Reuter Opus 1368 value sits on the Originally line beneath the rebuilder’s own headline opus. The two remaining records are both headed Reuter Organ Co. Opus 1368, one dated 1962 at the location AGO Convention, Houston, Texas, and one dated 1963 at Northminster Presbyterian Church, Indianapolis, and a location in that database can be an event rather than a building. The notes on those two records state that they describe one organ built for the 1962 national convention and later installed at Northminster, so the pair is a relocation expressed as two records rather than a numbering collision, but a reader who lands on either record alone cannot see that without opening the notes.

Numbers can also diverge between the builder’s own paper and the database. The Reuter specification flyer for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio gives that instrument as Opus 2244 with 50 ranks, while the database records it as Opus 2245 of 2021 with 52 ranks and 2,852 pipes; whether the flyer describes a proposal superseded before completion, or two Reuter contracts at the church are being conflated, is not established. One opus number can carry more than one dated record, as with Reuter Opus 1900, entered both as a 1976 instrument and as a related 2009 entry at the same location, and the database states no general Reuter numbering rule for rebuilds. Seven opus values recorded against Reuter Organ Co. exceed 3,000, the highest above 50,000, which are inconsistent with any plausible Reuter series and are best read as data-entry artifacts, so the largest number in the database does not mark the end of the series.

A builder’s plate, where one exists, can carry the builder’s name and a date, and on at least one Reuter console it does. A contributor note recorded in May 2007 states that the console nameplate of Reuter Opus 2016 at Graystone Presbyterian Church, Knoxville, Tennessee, gives 1981 as the date of the instrument; the note does not say where on the console the plate sits, whether it carries the opus number, or whether the same practice held in other periods. Among the sources this page rests on, that single note is the only documented Reuter plate.

A documented marking location is builder-specific, era-specific and instrument-specific. The Museum of Ventura County research library photographs an E. & G. G. Hook nameplate on the console of an 1869 instrument, and a keyslip placement is documented for post-1945 Aeolian-Skinner signature organs, but neither location transfers to Reuter or to any other builder. The absence of a plate settles nothing either: the same museum records a church organ with no original nameplate that experts attributed to William A. Johnson of Westfield, Massachusetts, from its console construction, casework and pipe measurements, with a place name inscribed on one wooden pipe as a separate clue. The vocabulary met in records and reports, nameplate, name plate, signature plate, company plate, builder plate, keyslip, nameboard and stop jamb, describes different objects and positions, and a report should say which it means.

Nothing in the company’s own published history, the Kenneth Spencer Research Library finding aid at file level, the Pipe Organ Database record structure, the American Institute of Organbuilders windchest paper, the trade press, congregation and dedication accounts, relocation listings or the rebuild reports of other firms states where the Reuter Organ Company placed a builder’s plate or an opus number on a console, windchest, reservoir, pipework or any other component, or what such a plate looked like in any era of its 1917 to 2022 output. That is an absence in the documentation as of September 2026, not evidence that Reuter fitted no plates.

The consequence is that a plate on a Reuter instrument cannot be assumed to carry the opus number or to be the opus number, and a number found on a component cannot be assumed to be the opus number. Record exactly what any plate or stamp says and where it is, photograph it in place, and test the text against the database record and the surviving contract material instead of reading it as an identification on its own.

A plate or a database headline naming another firm does not by itself remove Reuter from the instrument’s history. The Pipe Organ Database can carry a rebuilder’s own opus number as a record’s headline with the Reuter number and year on the Originally line beneath it, as it does for the Peragallo and Schantz rebuilds of Opus 1368, so the firm named first is not always the firm that built the organ. Reading that layered history in both directions, another builder’s pipework kept inside a Reuter and another firm’s opus number attached to one, is the subject of Reuter Organs With Older Skinner or Möller Pipework. An attribution that falls between 1968 and 1972 raises a separate question, covered in The 1968–1972 Reuter Attribution Trap.

The Organ Historical Society Pipe Organ Database holds five builder entities whose names contain Reuter, and a search on one of them does not return instruments filed under the others. As of September 2026 they are Reuter Organ Co., typed Builder, with 2,751 records and the note Lawrence, Kansas, from 1918; The Reuter-Schwarz Organ Co., typed Builder, with seven records for the 1917 to 1919 predecessor firm; Adolph C. Reuter, typed Builder; and Carl Reuter and Robert Reuter, each typed Employee or Independent Contractor. Only the first two carry a substantial number of instruments.

The structured Active field on those records is a database field, not evidence of an era or of current operation. The Reuter-Schwarz entity shows Active Unknown to Present while its own note closes the firm at 1920, and the Reuter Organ Co. record shows Active from 1918 while its note dates the successor firm to 1920; the database keeps successive corporate names of one firm as separate records and carries the era boundary in free text rather than in the structured dates. Use the note and the instrument records, not the Active range, to decide which entity an instrument belongs under.

Most Reuter instrument records in the Pipe Organ Database carry a provenance note stating that the instrument was identified from the Reuter Opus List provided by Chris Leaver of the Reuter Organ Company in November 2005. A database attribution to Reuter is therefore, in most cases, a compiled list entry rather than an examined identification: it establishes that a master opus list existed in company hands in 2005 and was shared with the Organ Historical Society, not that the list is complete, internally accurate, publicly available or held at any known location. The database’s builder-level history for Reuter Organ Co. likewise rests on a published reference, David H. Fox’s A Guide to North American Organbuilders of 1997. An attribution from a list is good evidence that a Reuter contract existed for that opus and place; it is not evidence about the condition, completeness or present contents of the instrument. Where the builder’s own contract files, specifications and photographs are held, and how the opus number works as a search key in each place, is covered in Finding Reuter Factory Records and Specifications.

A count of Pipe Organ Database records is a count of records, not of opus numbers issued and not of instruments Reuter built. As of September 2026 the database holds 2,751 instrument records attributed to Reuter Organ Co., of which 2,457 carry an opus number and 294, roughly 11 percent, carry none; the same physical organ can appear as several records across rebuilds and relocations, and records exist for instruments Reuter rebuilt rather than built. A missing opus number in a record means that no contributor supplied one, not that the instrument never had one, which is the usual reason an owner finds an instrument listed but unnumbered and undated.

The record count therefore cannot be set against the company’s own statement that it built 2,245 new instruments, a figure that excludes its rebuilding and enhancement projects, or against a 2023 Kenneth Spencer Research Library exhibit figure of over 2,200 pipe organs by the 2017 centenary, or against a 2023 feature’s more than 2,000; each figure counts a different thing and none is averaged here. Excluding the implausible outliers, the highest Reuter opus numbers in the database cluster at 2,807, 2,488, 2,245, 2,243 and 2,242, so the observable top of the series lies in the low 2,200s with a small number of higher values, and the coincidence between the value 2,245 and the company’s total of 2,245 new instruments is suggestive but unproven.

Write down what each kind of evidence actually showed before anyone plans work on the instrument. That means the name form as it appears on the contract or program, uncorrected; the opus number and exactly where it was read, whether on a plate, in a program or in a database record; the text and position of any plate or stamp, photographed in place; the database record numbers consulted and the provenance note on each; and any contract, delivery and dedication dates with their sources, kept as separate dates rather than merged into one year. Windchest family and console generation are identification evidence of a different kind, examined on Identifying Reuter Ventil and Pitman Chests by Era and Physical Evidence and Reuter Console, Combination Action, and Control-System Modernization, and this page draws no date from either.

An identification assembled this way gives an inspection something to test against and gives the project file a starting point that a later reader can check, which matters because the attribution in the public record rests on a compiled list and the dates in it can sit a year or more from the instrument’s actual arrival. What that inspection should lead to, restoration, rebuilding or something narrower, is the decision covered in Restoring Versus Rebuilding a Historic Reuter.