Wicks Organ Company

If you need to know what the instrument is, which form of the company name it carries and what its opus number and any letter suffix mean, go to Identifying and Dating a Wicks. Compare the nameplate, opus number, physical evidence and surviving records, including the Pipe Organ Database’s multiple builder headings and cases where a single mark is inconclusive.

If you are looking for the original contract, specification, drawing or wiring file for a particular organ, go to Factory Records and Opus Documentation. Check which documents are known to survive, where custody remains uncertain, which public collections hold Wicks material, and what evidence is available when the contract is missing.

If the question is what DIRECT-ELECTRIC action actually is, how it differs from the electro-pneumatic and tracker actions beside it, and what a direct-electric chest does and does not tell you about the organ it is in, go to DIRECT-ELECTRIC Action. If you are holding a patent number, or have been told that a patent proves what is inside a particular organ, go to Direct-Electric Patents, which reads the patents as mechanism evidence and explains what they do not settle about an installed instrument.

If the instrument is one of the small standardized Wicks organs, or you are trying to understand why a few ranks produce so many stops, go to Unit Chests and Small-Organ Models. Compare the unit-chest construction, named models and wind supply, including what construction alone cannot establish about a particular organ.

If the relay is the question, meaning which generation of switching the organ has, what has been fitted to Wicks instruments since, and whether replacing the relay means replacing the console, go to Control-System Generations and Relays. If the fault seems to sit at the keys, the rectifier or the cabling rather than in the chest, go to Key Contacts, Rectifiers, and Wiring, which explains why a Wicks direct-electric organ carries so much wiring, what the names in the paperwork mean and what has been documented about this layer’s condition.

If you are deciding whether original Wicks action should be kept, restored or replaced, go to Preserving Versus Replacing the Action. Review the documentation needed before choosing, the preservation standard, and how parts availability affects the decision. If water has reached the organ or rodents have been inside it, go to Water and Rodent Damage, which sets out what is actually documented and on which instruments, what the components expose, and what an owner can do without touching the organ.

If you want to know which period of the firm’s work an instrument belongs to and what changed in the sound and the wind between the romantic, mid-century and neo-Baroque instruments, go to Tonal and Production Eras. Compare production history and tonal changes to understand the kind of Wicks organ you have; establishing its exact date requires identification evidence.

Wicks Organ Company began in Highland, Illinois, with three brothers named Wick, John, Louis and Adolph, who had been working as a watchmaker, a cabinet maker and a jeweler above a jewelry and watch-making store before they turned to building organs. By the company’s own account the firm worked first from a downtown Highland building and moved in 1910 to 1100 5th Street, a site it grew to seven acres and 88,000 square feet and occupied until 2017. The move that ended that occupancy, and the paperwork that traveled with it, belong at the end of this page.

The founding year is reported as 1906 and as 1908, and neither can be called settled. The company’s own About page and the Madison Historical encyclopedia at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville state that the three brothers incorporated in 1908; a tertiary encyclopedia article, a trade-directory listing, the Pipe Organ Database builder entities and the company’s own 2017 move announcement give 1906, which is also the year the Madison Historical entry gives for Opus 1, built for St. Paul R.C. Church in Highland.

The two dates may describe different events, the start of work and the formal incorporation, but the accounts that give one date do not explain the other, and a company publication of 1938 held in the Organ Historical Society library catalogue under the title ’30th anniversary of fine organ building’ is consistent with 1908 without proving it, since only its title and date are recorded. For an owner the practical point is narrow: a Wicks nameplate, where it is the plate the instrument was built with, places that instrument within the firm’s own operating period and no closer, and what else the plate, the opus number and the records can establish is worked through at Identifying and Dating Wicks Organs, Companies, and Opus Suffixes.

Wicks Pipe Organ Co. and Wicks Organ Company are two documented forms of one Highland firm’s name, and they are treated here as name forms rather than as separate companies or successive eras. United States patents filed between 1928 and 1933 name the assignee as Wicks Pipe Organ Co., a patent filed in 1939 names the assignee as Wicks Organ Co., and the Pipe Organ Database catalogues instruments under both ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’ and ‘Wicks Organ Co.’ as separate builder records.

As of September 1, 2026 that database in fact lists the firm’s instruments under three builder headings, including the bare name ‘Wicks’ noted as an alternate nameplate, all sharing the same active range and the same Highland description; how to read those headings against a particular instrument is the identification page’s job, not this one’s. The name Wicks Organ LLC belongs to the successor business described at the end of this page, and it is not a form of the historic company’s name.

DIRECT-ELECTRIC, in the company’s own glossary, names a whole system for controlling the organ, the patented electro-magnetic pipe valves in the chests together with the entire switching system that routes the electrical impulses from the keys to the proper valves, so the term is not a name for the chest valve alone. It does not follow that every Wicks organ is direct-electric: the company states that its first 275 instruments, built over its first thirteen years, used pneumatic and mechanical actions, and its parts page still lists parts for tracker, tubular and electro-pneumatic instruments.

Nor is every direct-electric chest a Wicks chest: the Organ Historical Society states that the abbreviations DE and EM describe how a windchest is built rather than who built it and that other builders use a similar system. Even the date the action was introduced is reported in four different ways by four different kinds of source, and no one of them settles the question. How the action works, how it compares with the actions beside it, those dates and the trademark are all at Wicks DIRECT-ELECTRIC Action: Meaning, Boundaries, and Comparison, and the patents are at Wicks Direct-Electric Patents.

Wicks practice changed materially during the 1960s and 1970s, when, according to a 2005 trade-journal profile of tonal director John E. Sperling, wind pressures fell, voicing shifted from closed-toe to open-toe and new regulators were developed as the firm moved from the heavily romantic instruments of the 1930s and 1940s toward neo-Baroque design; those characteristics place an instrument within a period of the firm’s practice, but they do not date it, and dating rests on the opus, nameplate and record evidence the identification page owns. What each period sounds like, how it was winded and how much the firm built in each is the subject of Wicks Organs by Tonal and Production Era.

The firm left its long-occupied factory in 2017: the company states that the sale of the 1100 5th Street property closed on January 1, 2017, that the office move was completed first and the shop move in June 2017, and that the new address is 416 Pine Street in Highland.

A large body of factory paperwork existed at that move: the company’s own announcement describes the office relocation as involving ’91 heavy file cabinets containing 111 years of correspondence, drawings, contracts, and wiring files’, carried from the 5th Street plant to Pine Street. Where that material is today is unverified: as of September 2, 2026 nothing the company has published says anything about the custody of its factory records, and the 2017 announcement remains the last public word on them. That is not evidence that the records are lost or out of reach; it is the limit of what has been established. The question of custody, of what public collections hold and of how to ask for a document is owned by Wicks Factory Records and Opus Documentation.

Wicks Organ LLC is a successor business, and it is described here only as it describes itself: its own staff page states that Scott Wick purchased the assets of Wicks Organ Company in May 2019 and that the business has operated as an LLC since, which is a statement about an asset purchase rather than a verified account of corporate continuity or ownership.

As of September 1, 2026 the business gives its address as 416 Pine Street, Highland, Illinois 62249, describes itself as a full-service organbuilder under Scott Wick, the third generation of family ownership, and lists tuning, emergency service, rebuilds, additions and parts among what it offers; its corporate form appears elsewhere as ‘Wicks Organs LLC’ and has not been independently verified. The most recent dated evidence of activity is the successor business’s own project page, which as of September 2, 2026 lists an installation at Peace United Church of Christ in Jerseyville, Illinois, on April 13, 2024, alongside other 2024-dated projects in Chesterfield and Gordonville, Missouri, and several described as in progress; that is company-published evidence of work into 2024, not a registry filing, and the site’s footer still reads 2020.

None of the pages beneath this one substitutes for looking at the instrument. What a particular organ is, what action and switching it actually carries, what its paperwork says and what condition it is in are established from the instrument and its records, and the condition pages set out what that record needs to contain before repair, restoration or replacement is chosen. Gather what is on the nameplate, the opus number if you have it, whatever contract or wiring paperwork the building holds and a plain description of the fault or the plan, and start from the page that owns the question.