1842 Mead Pipe Organ

Date: 1842 to after 1966
Location: Toronto, York, Ontario, Canada
Surnames/tags: VanNostrand-477 Mussen-105

Portable Pipe Organ, which sat at the Hillary House home in Aurora, Ontario, Canada from 1913 to 1966. Previously / subsequently at churches.

Biography

The organ was built by Mead and Co. of Montreal in c.1842 on a commission from St. James Cathedral in Toronto. It resided at St. James for a few years until they could fundraise for a bigger organ (as the oldest congregation in the city, they would've had fancy taste).

In 1847, it was sent to St. Pauls Church just north on Bloor St in Toronto when the congregation at St. James purchased a new and larger organ.

In 1872, it was purchased by Rev. Mussen Ephraim Horace Mussen (1842-1918) for Trinity Anglican Church in Aurora.

In 1912, Trinity decided to redecorate the church which included purchasing a new organ. The pipe organ moved into the Sunday School room. In 1913, either Edith or Robert Michael petitioned to have the organ moved to The Manor (Hillary House) to save it from meddling Sunday school kids.

It sat in the Dining Room (Present day Gift Shop of Hillary House, Aurora) until 1966 when unnamed Hillary's decided it would be better utilized by a church and had it moved to St. Clement's. And as far as I'm aware, it still resides there. ^[1] Photo ^[2]

Article

Ontario's Senior Organ by Hugh D. McKellar ^[3]

In the back gallery of St. Clement's (Eglinton) Anglican Church, Toronto, stands the oldest functioning organ in Ontario, quite possibly the oldest surviving organ manufactured in Canada. Built by the Montreal firm of Mead and Co., it was installed in Toronto's St. James's Cathedral in February 1842 - practically the only time in Ontario's history when it could have started out on the kind of career it has had. It was the second, perhaps even the third, organ to sound within St. James's, which had already gone through many changes since its congregation was formed in 1797. In 1803 its first building was opened for worship inwhat was then known as the village of York. For nearly two decades after that, people who wished to attend church regularly had little alternative to worshipping there, even if they had not been brought up Anglican. Sustained Roman Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist work began in York only during the 1820s, although clergymen of all these denominations had previously visited the settlement when they could, and held services for their own people. By that time the members of St. James's, while doubtless desirous that their names should be written in heaven, had learned a great deal about turning their church connection to worldly advantage as well, especially with the advent in1812 of a brilliant rector who was expert in that art. The most pertinent fact about Dr. John Strachan, for our purposes if for no one else's, is that he was tone-deaf. Music was thus one of the very few subjects on which he did not try hard, for two-thirds of a century, to lay down the law, not for Ontario Anglicans only, but for everyone who would let him. While he knew and cared nothing about music - and could indeed have spared little time for it from his activities in education and politics as well as church affairs - he knew and cared much about power and prestige, and secured all he could of both for his church and for himself. If an organ could have helped entrench the status of St. James's as the York church which really mattered, then an organ he would have had; but why bother, so long as no other place of worship could offer it any competition? Even by 1834, when York was incorporated as a city and renamed Toronto, no church but St. James's could easily have raised the price of an organ, or would have seen much point in buying one. The St. James's people did not on this account grow complacent; when they enlarged their building in 1831-2, they included an organ-loft, but we cannot be certain how long it stood vacant. We know that in 1835 there was printed in New York a book whose title-page reads: "A SELECTION OF PSALMS AND HYMNS for every Sunday and principal festival through-out the year, for the use of congregations in the Diocese of Quebec ... together with a number of chants. The whole of the music set and adapted by W. Warren, Organist of St. James's Church, Toronto." But on April 1, 1837, Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson - who was by then determined to leave both Toronto and the husband who had brought her there as soon as the Great Lakes should be clear of ice - wrote, 'The psalms at church are tolerably well sung, owing to the exertions of a competent musician who has received so little encouragement that he is at present preparing to go over to the States. She says also that Strachan was collecting subscriptions toward the cost of an organ, although what Toronto needed was a singing-School. This sounds as though Warren, having taken charge of St. James's music on the understanding that an organ would soon be acquired, departed when he grew weary of the delay Apparently the colony's receiver-general, Hon. J.H. Dunn, also grew impatient; for he made a subscription of £800, allowing the wardens to order from England an organ which arrived during the summer of 1838. Even better as a status symbol was the organist who agreed to come out from England to play it, Edward Hodges, since he already had his Mus. Doc. In September, the local newspapers reported that he had electrified the congregation by his first performance on the new instrument. Within weeks, however, he realized that he had unwittingly come to a colony in the grip of an economic depression which seemed unlikely to lift; then, on January 5, 1839, the church burned down, organ and all. No wonder Hodges left for New York as soon as he could, where he played first at St. John's, then at Trinity Church, until his retirement to England in 1859. The congregation he had abandoned was soon cheered by news from England: Toronto was at last to become the seat of a new diocese with Strachan as its first bishop, although his salary would have to be raised locally. W. Warren was at least spared seeing how they could bestir themselves to get something they wanted; they figured out how to finance, and carry through, the building of a cathedral by the time when Strachan returned in late autumn from his consecration in England. Their exertions must have left them too winded to warble, for they made no provision for any musical instrument, perhaps in hope that someone would seek to emulate Dunn. While waiting, they accepted the help of bandsmen from the regiment which then formed the Toronto garrison. But by November 27, 1841, a writer in the diocesan paper The Church could report that subscriptions had been opened toward an organ - and no cause, he thought, was more likely to arouse the parishioners' generous spirit. Maybe not - yet he must have known that just then they were chiefly concerned with subsidizing the erection of a chapel for Irish laborers, far enough from the cathedral to spare the ultra-respectable pew-owners their accent and their aroma. They chose to send no farther afield than Montreal for an organ worth no more than £225; then, when they were in a position to acquire (from England, naturally) an organ suited to their own status, they could demonstrate their generosity and their superiority by handing the little instrument on to some other church - perhaps "Little" Trinity, where they meant to put the Irish, or St. Paul's, which was under construction some two miles north of the cathedral.

An English builder might have queried the suitability for a cathedral of an organ with only 5 stops and 270 pipes; but that would raise no eyebrows in Montreal, whose largest church, Notre-Dame, seating 3500 people, had been served by an 8- stop instrument since its completion in 1829. The organ's modest size may also have influenced St. James's choice of an organist: for the only time in their history to date, they hired a woman, listed in all surviving records only as "Mrs. Gilkinson." I have not been able to verify Dr. Helmut Kallmann's statement that this lady's annual salary was first fixed at £100, then reduced in 1846 to £75, and finally in 1848 to £50, whereupon she resigned; but his conclusion that she was starved out may result from projecting into the past the attitude of the cathedral's more recent authorities toward women musicians. In the city directory of 1846-7, "Gilkinson, Mrs., organist, St. James's Cathedral" appears directly above "Gilkinson, D., bursar's office, University College." Had she been D. Gilkinson's wife, his name would surely have been given as householder, and hers disregarded; thus it looks more as if she were his widowed mother. Since everyone then connected with University College was also connected with St. James's, it could well be that someone undertook to subsidize the education of a promising, fatherless boy by having the church pay his mother an inflated salary until he should be able to support her. Besides, in 1846, Strachan decided that, at 69, he could no longer carry on the dual responsibility of bishop and rector, and turned the latter post over to the Rev. Henry J. Grasett. Perhaps money had to be diverted from Mrs. Gilkinson to Grasett, who also had a family to support. Now Grasett, unlike Strachan, was musical enough to edit three collections of children's hymns, two of them with tunes; hence he may well have been the moving spirit behind the order which went, in 1847, to May and Son of Adelphi Terrace, London, for an organ to cost £1200. This may have been more than Mrs. Gilkinson cared totackle; anyway, she dropped out of the picture, and soon afterward out of the city directory as well. The Mead organ left St. James's about when she did, but we at least know where it went. By then, victims of the Irish famine were crowding into Toronto and "Little" Trinity, and nobody was about to waste an organ on them; so the instrument journeyed two miles northward to St. Paul's. Here it was retained past the enlargement of 1860, to be sold for $600 to Trinity Church, Aurora, some 30 miles northward again, in 1872. It remained in use until 1912, when it was relegated to the Sunday-school room.

Now a daughter of the Rev. Horace Musson, Trinity's rector from 1882 ti! 1900, had married a local resident of means, Col. R.N. Hillary. In 1919 she had the organ moved into her spacious Aurora home, "The Manor"; in 1932 she and her husband compiled a record of all they knew about it. They added to it an electric blower and a pedal-board of twelve keys. And it occupied their home longer than they did; after they died, their son and daughter, aware that the organ had acquired historical interest and value, sought for it a suitable permanent home. This they found at St. Clement's (Eglinton), which received the organ in 1966, and where it may still be heard at Christmas and on other special occasions.

Sources

1. ↑ Hillary House Staff, Kathleen Vahey
2. ↑ 1981 Publication, The Tracker, Volume 26, Issue 1, Page 6
3. ↑ Trinity Aurora A Parish History, by W. John McIntyre, 1996, page 18,

https://www.trinityaurora.ca/_files/ugd/15f1ca_499bb0a258794f508ee641860cbad3d4.pdf

https://organhistoricalsociety.org/downloads/tracker/public/old/1981-26-1.pdf