Schantz Organ Company

• Specification, stoplist or records for a particular instrument: Finding Specifications and Records, which explains where Schantz records are held and how the firm’s changing names affect a search.
• What an opus number establishes about an instrument’s origin: Interpreting Opus Numbers.
• Which chest and action generation an instrument belongs to: Chest and Action History, the dated sequence of Schantz key actions from tracker through electro-pneumatic work.
• Telling the chest types apart when you are looking at one: Cross-Top Pitman, Slider, and Ventil Chests.
• Small unified instruments and what unification means for the organ in front of you: Unit Organs.
• Separating original console and control work from later modernization: Console and Control Development.
• Deciding what to keep, repair, restore or replace: What Schantz Preserves During a Rebuild, which draws on documented Schantz projects.
• Questions about the blower rather than the organ: Zephyr Organ Blowers, covering the Zephyr Electric Organ Blower Company and its model families.

Profiles of other firms are on the Organ Builders index.

A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co., Schantz Organ Co. and Schantz Organ Company are the same family business at different dates, not three companies and not a chain of acquisitions. The Organ Historical Society’s Pipe Organ Database files the firm as A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co. for 1892 to 1946 and as Schantz Organ Co. after that, and the shorter Schantz Organ Co. is the heading you will usually meet in catalogues and databases for the present firm. Because the database splits the firm’s work between the two headings, a search under only one name returns only part of the output; Finding Schantz Specifications and Records explains how to search across the split.

The earliest records carry the founder’s surname in its original spelling, Tschantz. The firm name appears without the initial T from 1892, when the founder’s sons Edison F. and Oliver A. Schantz joined the business, and the family’s own chronology, published in The American Organist in September 2023, says the spelling of the family name was officially changed to Schantz in 1899 to ease pronunciation as the business grew. The 2023 anniversary feature in The Diapason gives the same 1899 date. Both statements can be true at once, one for the firm’s trading name and one for the family name.

Which name a record is filed under is a different question from which firm built the surviving material. A Schantz opus number, and a Schantz-supplied chest, console or pipework in another builder’s organ, each establish less than they seem to; Interpreting Schantz Opus Numbers for New Instruments and Rebuilds sets out what each does and does not prove.

The 1873 founding date belongs to reed organs, not pipe organs. The Diapason’s anniversary feature states that Tschantz started his company in 1873 to build “Ohio Beauty” reed organs, and the 2021 National Register nomination for the Orrville plant adds that he had built furniture on the family farm at Kidron, Wayne County, Ohio, employing five workers by 1867, at eighteen, before founding the Ohio Beauty Reed Organ Company. The pipe-organ firm grew out of that business. When the Ohio Beauty name appears in a record it refers to a reed organ, and a date drawn from it is a date in the reed-organ history, not evidence about a pipe organ.

Pipe-organ work is dated separately. Schantz was building tracker organs by 1891. Its transition to tubular-pneumatic action began by 1903 and overlapped tracker construction, which continued until at least 1908. Electro-pneumatic work followed in 1918, according to the firm’s 2023 anniversary account. One product of that later work was the Schantz cross-top pitman chest, built with laminated yellow poplar toeboards running perpendicular to the ranks of pipes. The sequence of actions and the evidence for each date are in Schantz Chest and Action History Across Tracker and Electro-Pneumatic Eras, and the cross-top pitman chest is compared with the firm’s Blackinton-style electro-pneumatic slider chest and its ventil chest in Schantz Cross-Top Pitman, Blackinton-Style Slider, and Ventil Chests.

The published figures describe different periods and are best quoted with their scope. The 2023 Diapason feature says more than 3,000 pipe organs have been built and installed across the United States and in Australia. The 2021 National Register nomination says about 1,000 church organs had been produced by 1940. The two are compatible: the 1940 figure is a milestone within the larger all-time count.

The Pipe Organ Database is not a production count. Its records under the A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co. heading number in the hundreds, which reflects what has been catalogued, not what was built, and its builder note draws on information from an officer of the firm, so it is not an independent check on the company’s own figures.

Schantz is an active builder. Its website, checked in September 2026, lists current staff and services and instruments completed through 2025, and the American Institute of Organbuilders’ October 2025 convention handbook included the firm’s tonal director and a Schantz instrument. The company gives one general contact: 626 South Walnut Street, PO Box 156, Orrville, Ohio 44667, telephone 800.416.7426, info@SchantzOrgan.com.

The firm describes itself as the largest and oldest American pipe-organ builder still under the management of the founding family, with work continuing under the fourth and fifth generations. The National Register nomination puts it a little more narrowly, as the oldest builder still known to be under the direct management of the founding family. Both descriptions emphasize continued management by the founding family.