Identifying and Dating Wicks Organs, Companies, and Opus Suffixes

Three Wicks nameplate wordings are documented, and they differ enough that the wording tells you roughly which generation of plate you are looking at, though not when the organ behind it was built. The earliest is ‘Louis Wick Bros. Highland, IL’, recorded as the original intact plate of Opus 1 of 1906 in a Pipe Organ Database note contributed in 2010 by a Wicks employee. A console of 1926 carried an ivory plate engraved in black lettering ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co., Highland, Ill., U.S.A.’; the contributor who reported it in 2015 from personal knowledge of the instrument qualified the plate as ‘believed to be from the 1926 console’. The replacement console Wicks supplied for that same instrument in 1981 carried a brass plate stamped in black with the single word ‘Wicks’ and a pipe facade device.

That bare wording is what the Pipe Organ Database’s separate ‘Wicks’ builder entity, annotated ‘(Alternate nameplate)’, appears to be tracking, though the database does not say which instruments were assigned there on nameplate evidence. These are three plates from two contributed notes, not a company-wide sequence, and no source states when any change of plate design took effect. A builder plate of any wording constrains the instrument only to that firm’s operating period: it sets an earliest possible date, and the plate can itself be a later replacement.

A single Wicks console can carry two nameplates from different eras at once, so reading one plate does not establish the date of the instrument it is attached to. The documented case is the instrument above: when Wicks fitted the replacement console in 1981, the older ivory plate survived alongside the new brass one. One reported instance shows that the pattern occurs, not how often it occurs, and that is enough: a plate tells you who made the console or later worked on it, and the date has to come from the opus number and the records.

On the instruments one regional survey examined, the Wicks opus number was stamped or embossed on several major components rather than on the console alone. Blaine Olson’s Utah Valley Pipe Organs survey states that Wicks ‘usually stamps the opus number into every part of the organ – into the framework, regulators, chests, inside the console, and even sometimes on the low CC or middle c pipes of each rank’, and elsewhere that the firm ‘stamps or embosses its opus numbers into every major part of their organs, even these rackboards’. The statement carries no era qualification, but the Wicks instruments the survey documents are dated 1973 to 1994, and it is a volunteer practitioner report from one region rather than a builder-wide rule.

No published source states where Wicks stamped opus numbers before the Second World War, so the surveyed practice cannot be carried back to a 1920s or 1930s instrument; the company’s own literature of the 1930s and a Wicks opus list of 1988 are the kinds of record that would settle the question. Writing on a pipe is a different kind of evidence from an opus stamp: a 1936 Wicks instrument was identified from writing on one pipe read together with factory records, which is instrument-specific and not a practice to expect elsewhere. Where the console plate is gone, the framework, regulators, chests, console interior and rackboards are the documented places on a later instrument; on an earlier one the number may have to come from paperwork, which is the subject of Wicks Factory Records and Opus Documentation.

Both names belong to the same Highland, Illinois firm, and both are documented on primary paperwork in overlapping years. United States patents filed from 1928 to 1933 name the assignee as Wicks Pipe Organ Co., an Illinois corporation at Highland, and a patent filed in 1939 names the assignee as Wicks Organ Company, also described as an Illinois corporation at Highland. That sequence is consistent with a name change by one corporation, but it does not prove one, because no corporate filing has been examined. The Pipe Organ Database’s biographical note for John F. Wick says he ‘established Wicks Pipe Organ Co. of Highland, IL with brothers, 1906’, naming the longer form as the name at foundation, without dating any later change.

Founding is itself reported two ways: the company’s own About Us page and the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville public-history entry give 1908 for incorporation, while a tertiary encyclopedia article and a trade-directory listing give 1906, the year the university entry gives for Opus 1; the two dates may describe different events, and no source reconciles them. For dating purposes the disagreement matters only at the margin: a Wicks plate of any wording sets an earliest date of 1906 or 1908, and nothing in the name settles which. The corporate story itself belongs to Wicks Organ Company.

The two names cannot be treated as strictly sequential eras, and a changeover date cannot be inferred from imprints, because the longer name reappears after the shorter one. Stanford’s Howe Collection finding aid records a client letter dated December 12, 1933 under the imprint ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co., Highland, Ill.’, a brochure titled ‘Small Pipe Organs’ dated February 1937 under ‘Wicks Organ Co., Highland, Illinois’, and then a run of house periodicals, ‘Wicks Organs of the Month’, issued monthly from April 1942 to November 1943 under ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’ again. Those names are the finding aid compiler’s transcriptions rather than readings of the documents, and the same collection contains at least one evident transcription error, so the sequence is evidence of what the firm printed on stationery and publicity, not necessarily of its registered name.

It remains possible that a formal change occurred on a specific date while older stationery and mastheads stayed in use; the imprints simply cannot show it.

The practical rule follows: an instrument marked ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’ is not thereby earlier than one marked ‘Wicks Organ Co.’, and the Pipe Organ Database illustrates the point by attributing Wicks instruments of the single year 1926 variously to ‘Wicks Organ Co.’, ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’ and ‘Wicks’. The present company’s About Us page, as of September 1, 2026, uses ‘Wicks Organ Company’ throughout its history and does not use the patent-era form of the name; that is a dated website observation, not evidence about corporate continuity.

The business operating today is a successor describing itself, not the historic corporation continuing under a new label. 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 the acquisition; that is the successor’s description of an asset transaction, and nothing here treats it as verified corporate continuity or ownership. Even the successor’s name is rendered two ways: as of August 31, 2026 the website footer reads ‘Wicks Organs LLC’, while a trade-journal directory listing and the firm’s own event listing use ‘Wicks Organ LLC’. For identification the consequence is narrow: the LLC names describe the business after the May 2019 purchase, and a historic name on an older instrument says nothing about who owns the business now.

A Wicks opus number gives an approximate year, and only an approximate one, by comparison with dated instruments. A congregational history describes the number as analogous to a serial number and reads Opus 3296 as a running count; that is an owner’s explanation rather than a builder’s definition of the system. Dated instrument records in the Pipe Organ Database anchor the series at roughly Opus 9 in 1908, Opus 606 to 697 in 1926, Opus 2978 in 1949, Opus 3678 in 1957, Opus 4415 in 1964, Opus 5298 in 1973, Opus 5788 to 5877 in 1981, Opus 6075 in 1985 and Opus 6210 in 1994, with the records for 1919 running from Opus 264 to Opus 284.

Documented individual instruments fill in the same curve: Opus 1 (1906), Opus 20 (1910), Opus 74 (1912), Opus 777 (1927), Opus 1498, 1500 and 1524 (all 1936), Opus 1836 (1938), Opus 2575 (1944), Opus 3296 (1953), Opus 3658 (1955), Opus 3688 (1958), Opus 4400 (1963), Opus 4497 (1965), Opus 5523 (1975), Opus 5930 (1983), Opus 6001 (1984) and Opus 6419 (2005). Wicks’s own listing for Opus 3140 describes a four-manual instrument of 45 ranks built and installed in 1951.

These are sampled anchors from a third-party catalogue and from individual project accounts, not a factory opus list; individual records may be misdated, and the anchors do not license interpolating an exact year for an arbitrary number. Nor is the identifier always a plain integer: the catalogue carries ‘Opus 1011or’ on a 1908 instrument and ‘Opus 67298’ on a 1982 instrument, strings that may be catalogue transcription artifacts rather than factory usage, so a Wicks opus identifier cannot be assumed to be a plain sequential integer.

A letter after a Wicks opus number marks a later phase of work by the firm on the instrument that already carries that number, not a separate new instrument of the later year. The clearest case is Opus 633-B: the Pipe Organ Database record for Friends Church, Winchester, Indiana, is headed ‘Opus 633-B, 1981’, carries the line ‘Originally Wicks Organ Co. (Opus 633, 1926)’, and describes the 1981 work as rewiring, the addition of three ranks and replacement of the original console. The same catalogue shows ‘Opus 673-R, 1960’ over the original Opus 673 of 1926 and ‘Opus 2978B, 1981’ over Opus 2978 of 1949.

The records do not say what each letter means; do not read ‘R’ as rebuild or ‘B’ as a second contract without a factory source, and allow that the suffix may be a catalogue editorial device rather than a number the company itself issued. The letter B also implies an earlier lettered phase, yet no record for an Opus 633-A appears in the database; that absence is not evidence that no such phase of work occurred, only that the catalogue does not describe it.

The suffix pattern is not peculiar to Wicks: the same database records ‘Karl Wilhelm (Opus 89-A, 2012)’ over ‘Originally Karl Wilhelm (Opus 89, 1984)’, and a convention evidenced for one firm must not be transferred to another. A suffix is not the only way later Wicks work is recorded. Some records simply repeat the original number with the later year, such as ‘Wicks Organ Co. (Opus 2787, 1980)’ over ‘Originally Wicks Organ Co. (Opus 2787, 1946)’, and the reason for the differing treatment is not stated. A rebuilt instrument may instead receive an entirely new high number: the 1926 Wicks Opus 622 at Kimball Avenue Methodist Church, Waterloo, Iowa, is catalogued after its 1955 work as ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co. Opus 3622’, a single instance that supports no ‘add 3000’ rule.

The consequence for anyone compiling dates is that a raw opus-and-year list drawn from the database will contain pairs that are not new-instrument pairs: of the 73 Wicks records the database returned for the year 1980 on September 1, 2026, several carry opus numbers of 1930, 1946, 1952 and 1968 against a 1980 work year. One further wrinkle: the database’s HTML page title strips the prefixes and suffixes that the page body displays, so the record showing ‘Opus 633-B, 1981’ is titled ‘Wicks Organ Co. – Opus 633, 1981’; read the body of the record, not the browser tab.

Wicks Opus 3447 paired with the year 1980 is an unresolved anomaly, not evidence of a numbering policy. Blaine Olson’s Utah Valley survey pairs Opus 3447 with 1980 at the American Fork Utah Central Stake, in a list whose other five pairs – Opus 5388 in 1973, Opus 5507 in 1975, Opus 5539 in 1976, Opus 5741 in 1979 and Opus 6277 in 1994 – fall where the anchors above would place them. The Pipe Organ Database record for Opus 3447, at the American Fork 6th and 8th Wards chapel, carried no year at all on September 1, 2026, no rank count, and a stoplist annotated ‘Stoplist copied from console photos’, which is a gap in the catalogue rather than evidence that the instrument is undated.

The Wicks numbers the database itself associates with 1980 – 5487, 5766, 5785, 5809, 5853, 6120 and 6148 – put Opus 3447 roughly two thousand numbers below that band. Treat the pair as two attributed statements that do not agree, carry both, and look for a dated contract or factory record before relying on either; the records that might settle it are described at Wicks Factory Records and Opus Documentation.

A Wicks nameplate does not establish that the instrument has DIRECT-ELECTRIC action, because the firm’s earliest instruments did not. Wicks Organ LLC states that ‘In their first 13 years of building pneumatic and mechanical action instruments, the Wicks built 275 instruments’, and its parts page offers replacement parts for ‘tracker action, Tubular, Electro-Pneumatic, and DIRECT-ELECTRIC action instruments from 1914 to the present day’.

Read as an opus range, the company’s figure places the end of the pneumatic and mechanical period at approximately opus 275, though the statement gives an instrument count rather than an opus number, and the equation assumes a strictly sequential series with no skips. The figure is consistent with the catalogue: the Pipe Organ Database’s Wicks records for 1919 run from Opus 264 to Opus 284, thirteen years after the 1906 foundation date the database uses, though counted from 1908 the thirteen years end in 1921, so the consistency is suggestive rather than proof.

One early instrument is documented directly: Opus 20 of 1910, at the First German Evangelical Church in Cincinnati, later Columbia United Church of Christ, is recorded with tubular-pneumatic key and stop action on the authority of the 1965 Organ Historical Society Convention Handbook, as relayed in a 2022 database note. The Southern Illinois University Edwardsville entry adds that the opus list passed 1,000 in the following fifteen years, and the company says the same of the fifteen years after it invented DIRECT-ELECTRIC action, but neither statement ties Opus 1000 to a calendar year without assuming a start date.

By 1926 a Wicks contract was specifying direct-electric action in the firm’s own period language. The contract for Opus 633, quoted from the church’s archive in the instrument’s Pipe Organ Database record, reads: ‘The action is electric throughout with a separate and individual valve directly under each speaking pipe. The valves are of an electro magnetic type, and in an individual direct electric circuit with the contact of the corresponding key in the console’, and ‘The Chests are of the universal wind type.’ The quotation reaches the record second hand, through a 2015 database note rather than through the contract itself, but the wording is what a 1920s Wicks contract for this action looks like and is worth recognizing if a similar document survives for your instrument.

What the action does, and how it differs from the electro-pneumatic and tracker actions beside it, is explained at Wicks DIRECT-ELECTRIC Action: Meaning, Boundaries, and Comparison; here it matters only as a date boundary.

Taken together, the tubular-pneumatic Opus 20 of 1910, the company’s statement about its first 275 instruments and the direct-electric contract for Opus 633 of 1926 bracket the Wicks change to DIRECT-ELECTRIC action between roughly opus 275 and opus 633, with the company’s own figure placing it near the lower end. That is a bracket, not a boundary: no source states an opus number at which the new action began, and none excludes a period in which both action types were built.

The bracket runs in one direction only. A pneumatic or mechanical Wicks action is consistent with an early number, but the presence of direct-electric chests is not proof that they are original to the instrument, and it is not a reliable basis for dating the action. The Pipe Organ Database record for Wicks Opus 67298 at First Methodist Church, the Chicago Temple, states that Wicks ‘converted the chests to Direct Electric action’ during renovation work completed in May 1990; one named instrument shows that such conversions happen without saying how common they are.

Nor is a direct-electric chest by itself a Wicks chest. The Organ Historical Society states that the abbreviations ‘DE’ (Direct Electric) and ‘EM’ (electro-mechanical) describe how a windchest is built rather than who built it, and that other builders use a system similar to the Wicks action, so a chest described as ‘DE’ is not on its own evidence of Wicks manufacture. A chest of this class therefore dates and attributes nothing on its own; it needs the nameplate, the number or the paperwork beside it, and even then it only brackets the instrument. Whether an original action should be kept is a separate decision, taken up at Preserving Versus Replacing Original Wicks Action.

The Pipe Organ Database files the Highland firm under at least six differently named builder entities, and the split reflects the recorded form of the name, not the company’s corporate history. A builder search for ‘Wicks’ on September 1, 2026 returned four: ‘Wicks Organ Co.’ (record 7431) with 2,844 instrument records, ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’ (record 6725) with 233, bare ‘Wicks’ (record 7432), annotated ‘(Alternate nameplate)’, with 113, and ‘Wicks/Rodgers’ (record 7617), annotated ‘Not a company, see article for details’, with none. Two more entities use the singular family spelling and do not come back from a search on ‘Wicks’: ‘Louis Wick Bros.’ (Highland, Illinois, ca. 1905) and ‘Louis, John, and Adolph Wick’ (from 1906), and they may overlap with the plural-spelling entities rather than describe distinct firms.

All three plural-spelling firm entities carry the same active range, 1906 to the present, and the same Highland description, and the largest holding sits under ‘Wicks Organ Co.’ rather than under the fuller corporate name. The database publishes no editorial policy stating how an instrument is assigned to one entity rather than another; the reading that the split follows the recorded name form rests on the entities’ own distinction notes and on how the records behave. The ‘Wicks/Rodgers’ entity, with zero instruments, shows that a combined pipe-and-electronic attribution of that form is treated as a description rather than as a builder.

A search under any single Wicks builder name returns an incomplete set, and an owner who searches only ‘Wicks Organ Co.’ misses, as of September 1, 2026, the 233 records under ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’ and the 113 under bare ‘Wicks’. The database’s free-text builder filter does match every entity whose name contains the typed string, so a search on the stem ‘Wicks’ returns all the plural-spelling entities at once; the two singular-spelling entities still have to be searched separately.

Assignment between entities is inconsistent even within a year: of the twenty-two records returned for ‘Wicks’ and 1919, Opus 264 to Opus 276 sit under ‘Wicks Organ Co.’ while Opus 284 sits under ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’, with no reason stated. One instrument can carry two entity names within a single record set: the Basilica of St. Adalbert, Grand Rapids, lists ‘Revision 1 – 1980 – Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’ while its original-builder line reads ‘Originally Wicks Organ Co. (Opus 5785, 1980)’. And the entity does not report the plate: the Winchester instrument whose surviving 1926 console plate reads ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’ is filed under ‘Wicks Organ Co.’, the plate wording coming from a contributed note rather than direct inspection.

An instrument catalogued under one Wicks entity is therefore no evidence about the population under another, and the builder-name string on a record cannot be used to date the instrument or to establish what its nameplate reads. Record counts are a catalogue state on one day, not a production total, and the database revises its entities without notice; how many organs Wicks built is a question for Wicks Organ Company. Location fields can lag as well: on September 1, 2026 the record for Opus 1 still gave its address as 1100 5th Street, Highland, the factory the company vacated in 2017, so the catalogue is not a reliable guide to where an instrument is now.

A rebuilt instrument gets a second record in the Pipe Organ Database, headed by the rebuilding firm and its opus number, with a line of the form ‘Originally <original builder> (Opus <number>, <year>)’ beneath it. That heading gives the rebuilder primacy and the original builder second place, the reverse of how owning institutions usually describe the same organ, so a Wicks heading can sit over another builder’s instrument and another firm’s heading over a Wicks one. The ‘Originally’ line is what lets you tell a rebuilder’s opus number from a new-instrument number, but it is not populated on every record: some plainly later work carries no such line, and where the original builder used job numbers the line may carry a builder and year with no number.

Wicks Opus 1 appears twice, a century apart: once under ‘Louis Wick Bros.’ with the year 1906 and once under ‘Wicks Organ Co.’ with the year 2006 for its restoration, the two records cross-linked and the 2006 record carrying the original number rather than a new one. Absence works the same way in reverse: an instrument, number or record missing from a database or archive finding aid is evidence only that the consulted resource does not describe it, never that it did not exist.

Instruments built at the Wicks plant in Highland were sold under Robert Morton nameplates, so neither nameplate identifies the builder of the other’s instruments. A specialist history of the Robert Morton Organ Company puts the number at about thirty-seven, states that they used the Wicks action and Wicks construction practice, and elsewhere gives estimates ranging from 37 to 55 with the actual number unknown; none of these figures comes from a factory record. The same history describes these instruments as typically Wicks construction throughout except for consoles built in Van Nuys or carrying Robert Morton features such as division labels and stops, and as almost exclusively small instruments of four to six ranks.

Early Robert Morton builder’s plates themselves named two factory locations, Van Nuys, California and Highland, Illinois, together with a division of American Photo Player, and a plate naming two factories does not say which one built the instrument in front of you. A small organ with a Robert Morton plate is therefore a candidate for Highland manufacture, not a settled case, and the console features, the construction and any surviving contract have to be weighed together.

A Wicks record, opus number or plate can sit on an instrument that another firm built, because Wicks appears in the catalogue as later work on other builders’ organs. Examples in the Pipe Organ Database include a 1997 Wicks record over an originally 1908 Hinners Organ Company instrument, a 1981 Wicks record over an originally 1909 Hinners instrument, a 1981 Wicks record over Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1493 of 1967, and Wicks Opus 6210 of 1994 over M. P. Moller Opus 4685 of 1926. In every such case the Wicks opus number dates the Wicks intervention, not the original instrument.

The firm servicing an instrument is a further identity layer, distinct from the firm that built it; Wicks itself, as of September 1, 2026, publicly offers rebuilds and additions on instruments of many other makes, which says what the company offers and nothing about the scope of work on any particular organ.

A surviving Wicks instrument’s present state may reflect another firm’s work, so what you see today is not necessarily what Wicks built. Catalogued instances include work by Smith Gauntt around 1946, Harold B. Curryer in 1986, Pipe Organ Builder Associates in 1981, Robert D. Hoppe & Co. in 1981 and Karstens OrganWorks, Ltd. in 2008, with no proportion of the Wicks population implied. The 1981 return to Opus 633 records the other choice: the congregation’s trustees chose the Wicks Organ Company over an independent serviceman on the ground that the instrument was a Wicks product, noting that the serviceman did not use Wicks parts and that the company would not sell parts to him. That is a single congregation’s reasoning of 1981, reported second hand in 2015, and not a statement of any firm’s present parts policy.

Set side by side, the plate wordings, any opus stamps found, the action type present and the catalogue entries under each Wicks entity are what let an identification be stated with its limits attached, and a written record of them is the starting point for any documentation of the instrument or planning of work on it.