Identifying Steere, Steer & Turner, and J. W. Steere Organs

The two published accounts of when the founder added the final e to his name disagree, and neither cites a document. A 2012 article in The Diapason gives the founder as ‘John Wesley Steer (1824-1900) (he later changed the spelling to Steere)’ and dates the change loosely, saying ‘it was about this time that Steer altered the spelling of his name, adding an “e” to the end’, where ‘this time’ is the 1891 reorganization of the firm. A 2017 article in the same journal, by a different author, puts the change around 1880-90.

The practical consequence is that an organ of the 1880s may legitimately carry either spelling, so the spelling of the trading name on a nameplate or in a contract does not fix a date. Later documents add another layer. One parish account describes its 1886 Opus 220 as built by ‘the Steere & Turner Organ Company in Springfield, Massachusetts’, using the later spelling for an instrument the trade-journal accounts place in the Steer years, so the spelling in a parish record reflects the writer’s habit, not the firm’s usage at the time.

A printed postal cover dated 1883 carries the Steere spelling, earlier than either account allows. A Stanford University finding aid for the Richard J. Howe Collection of musical-instrument literature itemizes a cover imprinted ‘Steere & Turner, Builders of Cathedral & Church Organs, Springfield, Mass.’ and dates it 1883, and a second cover imprinted ‘Steere & Turner, Church Organ Builders, Springfield, Mass.’ dated 1893; both sit in Box 99 in the series ‘Postal covers and trading cards, 1864-1992’. The covers themselves have not been examined, and a finding-aid transcription may normalize spelling, so the 1883 entry is not proof that the firm printed Steere that early. The 1893 cover is consistent either with continued use of the old partnership name or with the separate Steere & Turner formed by John S. Steere and George Turner, and the finding aid does not say which.

Set against that, the OHS Pipe Organ Database builder register and the 2012 trade-journal account both keep ‘Steer & Turner’ for the partnership through 1891. The positions stand side by side; no single date for the change of spelling follows from them, and none is offered here. The Howe finding aid lists no item under any J. W. Steere name form, though items can be described under headings that do not carry the name.

Steer & Turner was the founding partnership, J. W. Steere & Sons replaced it in 1891, and a second Steere & Turner with different partners existed by 1894. The 2012 Diapason account has it that ‘in 1891 John Steere and George Turner decided to part ways, and John took his sons into the partnership to become J. W. Steere & Sons’, and that ‘by 1894 he had returned to form a partnership with John Wesley Steere’s son, John S. Steere, to form a new Steere & Turner in competition with his old partner’. Two distinct firms therefore carried a Steer(e) & Turner name at different dates, and a ‘Steere & Turner’ attribution without a date does not say which one built an organ.

Town names do not settle it either. The same journal records that ‘in 1868 Steer & Turner bought a lot on the corner of Elm and Meadow Streets in Westfield’, while the 1875 organ for St. Paul, Minnesota was ‘originally constructed in Springfield, Massachusetts’, so the partnership moved from Westfield to Springfield within its own trading-name era, on a date those two statements do not give. The OHS Pipe Organ Database places the later J. W. Steere firms in Springfield from 1891 onward.

The firm stated its own corporate succession on the title page of its 1902 trade catalog: ‘J.W. Steere & Son Organ Company: successor to J.W. Steere & Son, successors to Steere & Turner: church organs’, published by J.W. Steere & Son Organ Co. of Springfield, Massachusetts. That title is a builder-primary statement of three successive trading names, made by the firm about itself for promotional purposes. It does not say what assets, staff or records passed from one form to the next, and a title-page succession is not the same as a dated change of company form.

The title is known from the WorldCat catalog record, OCLC 31611322. As of 2 September 2026 no digitized copy of the catalog had been located online, and the record shows no physical description and no holding library, so the title page is the part of the catalog a reader can currently rely on. Note the singular as well: the catalog title says ‘Son’, the register lists ‘J. W. Steere & Sons’, and instrument records and published writing use both.

The OHS Pipe Organ Database builder register separates at least eight Steere-lineage name forms with their own date ranges, and two of its entries for the same partnership do not agree. As read on 2 September 2026 it lists ‘J. W. Steer(e)’ at Westfield 1867-1879 and Springfield 1879-1900; ‘Steer & Turner [J.W. Steer]’ at Westfield 1866-1879 and Springfield 1879-1891; ‘J. W. Steere & Sons’ at Springfield 1891-1894; a second ‘J. W. Steere & Sons’ at Springfield 1894-1917; ‘Steere & Turner [John S. Steere]’ in Massachusetts 1893-1894; and ‘Steere Organ Company’ at Springfield ca. 1918-1921. A separate entry gives ‘Steer & Turner, Westfield, MA., ca. 1870-1891’ with no Springfield period at all. The register also places John S. Steere personally at Westfield by 1870, moving to Springfield in 1893/94.

Read those ranges as register records, not as dated corporate events. A database register is not a corporate filing, its entries are editable, and its two Steer & Turner entries cannot be averaged into one. Where a range matters for an attribution, the instrument’s own date evidence and the firm’s own contract records are the better guide, and the register is the place to start rather than the place to stop.

John Wesley Steer’s link to William A. Johnson of Westfield was personal employment and family, not a corporate relationship between the two firms. The 2012 Diapason article records that before setting up on his own he ‘sought employment with his father-in-law in the Johnson Organbuilding firm in Westfield, Massachusetts’, and that ‘Steer left the Johnson factory in 1866 to begin building organs on his own’. A parish organ history from Luther Memorial Church in Madison, Wisconsin, written independently of that article, says ‘John Wesley Steere (1824-1900) was a Protege of organ builder William A. Johnson of Westfield, Massachusetts’. Both describe a personal apprenticeship; neither describes shared ownership, shared assets or a shared opus series, and nothing in either makes any Steere firm a corporate succession from Johnson.

The connection is still useful as a comparison, if it is kept in its place. The 2017 account of the St. Paul renovation writes that ‘John Wesley Steer(e) (1824-1900) was a protege of William A. Johnson. It would be reasonable to suspect that these two organs share some amount of common DNA’, comparing the 1875 Steer & Turner with a 54-rank Johnson organ of 1877 in Westfield, and notes observed similarities such as flared Clarinets. The author offers that as a reasonable suspicion, not a finding, and presents no systematic comparison, so shared traits can guide what to look for without attributing an instrument to either firm. For the Johnson firm itself, and for telling a Johnson from a Johnson & Son instrument, see Identifying and Researching William A. Johnson and Johnson & Son Organs.

The Steer & Turner instrument whose construction is documented in most detail was a tracker-action organ on slider windchests. The 1875 organ for First Baptist Church, St. Paul, Minnesota had 41 ranks, 58-note keyboards and a 27-note pedal, and was dedicated on 26-27 May 1875 with Clarence Eddy playing. The account gives no opus number. It shows that the firm built large tracker organs on slider chests in the mid-1870s; it does not establish practice across the whole lineage, and most of what is known about Steere construction is instrument-specific in the same way.

On that St. Paul organ, four rounds of work over sixty years took out the original mechanism in stages, and each stage is a kind of alteration a Steere-lineage owner may find. In 1939 Arthur Fellows added pull-downs on the tracker chests and a new Reisner electric console, which put the original slider windchests under electric control and set aside the original mechanical key action. In 1958 J. R. Gould of St. Paul discarded the entire original mechanism, built new chambers and installed new Durst Pitman windchests, reducing the organ to 31 ranks with every division enclosed. In 1962 the console was replaced again with a pneumatic Moller console, and in 2000 further stops were disconnected or removed. In the 2013-14 renovation the console was gutted and new electric components replaced the pneumatic ones.

After 1939 this was an electrified instrument that still had its original chests; after 1958 it had neither original action nor original chests. An organ under any Steere name that now plays from an electric console and Pitman windchests may therefore hold original pipework and casework and nothing of the original action. This is one documented case, described by the firm that later renovated it, not a pattern proved across the lineage’s surviving instruments.

After that sequence the renovating firm found original material scattered rather than gone. Rank identities had to be reconstructed by a process of elimination ‘since all pipe labels were scribed by hand with a florid script that was very difficult to read’. The 16-foot zinc facade survived; the bass half of the 16-foot Open Wood Diapason was in place while its treble half and windchest were found in the basement near the blower; and original Great Mixture IV pipes were mixed with later additions. Hand-scribed labels of that kind are common to the period and are not a Steere signature, so they help confirm age rather than builder. The observation comes from a single project, reported by the firm doing the work.

Steere-lineage organs have been moved, rebuilt and restored, and the word a source uses for the work signals what to expect of the original material. Rebuilding replaces original mechanism or structure; a source’s own claim of restoration describes a different intervention with different consequences, and the two words should not be read as one. One organ-building firm’s own history states that in 1989 it ‘rebuilt the 1902 J. W. Steere & Son pipe organ in Immaculate Conception R. C. Church, Easthampton, MA’, with no scope of work, action type or outcome given.

The Madison parish history records a Steere organ with ‘mechanical (tracker) key and stop action’, bought for $12,000 from the Chicago Conference of the United Church of Christ out of a church with no resident congregation. That instrument was ‘completely restored by J. C. Taylor and Co. of Kaukauna, Wisconsin’, with its stenciled pipes repainted to their original colors and design by Mary Lou Davis, and was dedicated on 26 October 1997. The parish gives no opus number and no company form, saying only ‘initially known as Steere and Turner the company eventually became known as Steere & Sons’, so that instrument cannot be assigned to a specific Steere firm from that account.

Relocation on its own need not remove original material. The 1886 Opus 220, built for the Massachusetts Agricultural College chapel and bought for a meetinghouse in Amherst, Massachusetts around 1924, is recorded by its parish as still a tracker instrument, with its keyboards recovered and its tracker action re-nutted. The 1892 ‘J. W. Steere and Sons, Opus #344’ went from the Unitarian Universalist Church in Elgin, Illinois to a private owner’s studio in 1992, to auction after his death, and to Old Pine Street Church in summer 1998. There the parish says it retains ‘the original stop list and pipe work from 1892’ apart from three added stops; that claim is the parish’s own and the action type is not stated.

The opposite case is an organ carried under another builder’s opus number. An encyclopedia account of the Woolsey Hall organ at Yale records it as built in 1902 by the Hutchings-Votey Organ Company, enlarged in 1915 by ‘the J.W. Steere & Son Organ Company of Springfield, Massachusetts’, and brought to its present form in 1927-28 by the Skinner Organ Company as its Opus 722, without stating how much Steere material survives.

The Skinner Organ Company acquired the Steere firm in 1921 and ran the operation as its Westfield Branch, which closed in 1929. By 1927 Skinner was operating factories at both Boston and Westfield, Massachusetts. The two accounts of the acquisition disagree on where the acquired firm was based: the Aeolian-Skinner Archives timeline calls it ‘The Steere & Son Organ Company of Westfield, Massachusetts’, while David H. Fox, as reproduced by the OHS Pipe Organ Database, calls it ‘the Steer firm of Springfield, Massachusetts’, and that database’s own register places the Steere Organ Company at Springfield from about 1918 to 1921. Both agree that the branch factory Skinner then ran was at Westfield. Each position is kept with its own attribution; neither is preferred here, and a town on a document is a weak identifier in this lineage in any case.

For attribution the branch matters more than the acquisition. Jonathan Ambrosino records that organs produced at the Westfield branch were at first merely Steere organs with Skinner nameplates, that Dorchester factory construction details were only gradually assimilated into Westfield practice, and that by 1929 the distinguishing characteristics of a Westfield organ were few. That is an identified practitioner-historian’s observation, made without footnotes on the point, and not a universal rule. What it establishes is that a Skinner nameplate on an early-1920s instrument does not by itself guarantee Skinner construction, and that the acquisition does not by itself say what of Steere’s design or practice continued, or for how long.

The Organ Historical Society describes a ‘Steere & Turner Collection’ consisting of organ specification ledgers created by Steere & Turner and J.W. Steere & Son. The collection exists as a described resource in the Society’s ArchivesSpace interface, and its abstract, as harvested into ArchiveGrid, gives that one-sentence scope. Specification ledgers are business records of organ contracts, the firm’s own record of what it agreed to build, and on the Society’s description this is not a collection of drawings, correspondence or photographs; that absence is inferred from the abstract’s silence, not stated in it. A WorldCat record for archival material, OCLC 527796692, describes ‘Extant ledgers of Steere & Turner (Firm) and J.W. Steere & Sons (Firm), church organ builders in Westfield and Springfield, Massachusetts, 1884-1911’ as two ledger books arranged chronologically, Book 1 covering 1884-1900 and Book 2 covering 1897-1911, with each entry giving the purchaser’s name, stoplist, price and details of delivery. That record shows no holding institution, and its description closely matches the OHS collection without confirming that it is the same material.

The collection title is not its scope. The title names one trading name and the abstract names two, Steere & Turner and J.W. Steere & Son; the description is silent on whether J. W. Steere & Sons, the J. W. Steere & Son Organ Company or the Steere Organ Company are also represented, so an organ from one of those later forms may or may not be found in these ledgers. The finding-aid page itself stood behind a bot-verification screen on 2 September 2026 and no PDF finding aid for the collection was found on the Society’s main site, so the collection’s extent, inclusive dates, arrangement, processing status and access conditions remain to be read from the finding aid in an ordinary browser, or confirmed with the archivist.

The name form matters for searching as well: the collection is filed as ‘Steere & Turner’, while instrument records and published writing use ‘J.W. Steere & Son’, ‘J. W. Steere & Sons’, ‘Steer & Turner’ and ‘Steere’, and a search on one of those is not a search on the others.

The Society’s Library and Archives also holds a black and white photograph cataloged as ‘J.W. Steere & Son Organ Co. employees, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1903’, the photograph itself dated August 5th, 1903, which gives a dated anchor for that name form at Springfield in 1903; the name form is the cataloger’s, and the photograph’s own inscription has not been seen. A 2018 article by the OHS archivist in The Diapason listed Steere & Turner among the builder business records the Library and Archives then held, alongside other American builders. The Library and Archives is at Stoneleigh in Villanova, Pennsylvania, with access by appointment only, as stated in October 2018; the Society’s own special-collections page names no individual builder collections, saying only that ‘Special Collections primarily consists of the archives and business records of numerous American organ builders’ and directing readers to its search portal and to the archivist. Hours, contact routes and appointment policy change, so confirm them before planning a visit.

Whatever the ledgers or the nameplate say, the instrument is the final witness. A written record of the action, windchests, console and pipework as they stand now, set beside the name form and the date evidence, is what turns a Steere attribution into a documented one and gives any later project a scope to work from.