Pump Organ, the story

Pump organ, the story                                                       September 9, 2014, by Marilyn Elstad Jaeger

A  lovely old pump organ has had a location of prominence in our log cabin great room since 2005, but it goes a long way back in my history.  We moved to Franklin, Minnesota in 1952 when my father, George Elstad, became principal and band and choir director at Franklin High School.  I was thirteen.  This was not foreign territory for my parents.  Haakon and Marthea Elstad homesteaded near Central Lutheran Church, between Franklin and Fairfax, in 1869.  It was later known as the Distad farm.  My father’s mother – his birth mother Lena and his adoptive mother Mathilda (Lena’s sister) – grew up in Beaver Falls, just north of Redwood Falls, Minnesota.  Their father, Martin Jensen, was the sheriff of Renville County.  Mathilda married Ole Elstad in 1895.  My grandparents.

My mother, Berenice Loftness Elstad Ostrom, also had strong roots here.   Her grandparents were Einar (Hunsager) Nelson and wifeThea, who homesteaded right below Fort Ridgely on the Minnesota River in Nicollet County.   They were founders of the Ft.Ridgely and Dale Lutheran Church, located about six miles northwest of their farm.  The whole family knew of how well they regarded their pastor, Rev.  Rognlie.   Einar, 1829-1915, and Thea, 1840-1932, are buried in the cemetery at Ft. Ridgely and Dale Church.  Their third daughter, Palma, was born in 1873.  She was my grandmother.  Much of her early education was done in the home by parents and servants teaching homemaking skills.  According to family historian Elvina Loftness, “music was added after Grandfather purchased an organ.  As a result Palma became a part-time organist of the German Lutheran church where she served as a parish worker.”  Palma and Andrew Loftness, of Clear Lake township near Gibbon, Minnesota, were married in 1904 and moved to homestead in Thief River Falls, Minnesota.

I believe that same organ that my great-grandfather Einar Nelson purchased for their Minnesota Valley home was the one that ended up in our home in Wisconsin in 2005!  For atop the organ in the back room of Ft. Ridgely and Dale was a stick with the name ”Nelson” written on it.

Fast-forward to the 1950’s.   On Sunday afternoon drives an occasional stop for our family was at the churches east of Franklin.  The doors were always open!   Dad would sit down at one of the pump organs in the musty little back room and play.  He was good; I am still aspiring to play the piano like he did.

A half-century later, in 2005, my husband Dick and I borrowed a flatbed trailer from a neighbor and drove from our rural home outside of Blanchardville, Wisconsin to pick up the three pump organs still in the back room of Ft. Ridgely and Dale.  Dick and I had re-discovered them some years before on a southern Minnesota journey.  We learned they now  belonged to Arnemann Grender and his sister Marie Grender Clark.  Their parents entertained musically, and their mother I think was a Rognlie.  The deal was we could have the organs if we fixed up one for Arnemann.

In 2006 Illinois friends of ours, Dan and LuAnn Detloff, came to visit.  Dan was a music professor at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines.  I asked him to assess the three organs, and he agreed with me that two were clearly beyond repair.  We salvaged stops and keys and woodwork but they were otherwise already falling apart.

The third organ, however, was in good shape.  But not playable.  Our local piano tuner told me about a man in Wilton, Wisconsin, Verne Kirchoff, who fixed old pump organs.  In the fall of 2006 Dick and I loaded it onto our pickup truck and drove the 103 miles up through winding roads and valleys to Wilton, between Tomah and LaCrosse.

Verne lovingly restored the organ and delivered it to us in June, 2007.  He had installed an electric motor but I asked him to remove it, preferring the original authenticity.  He replaced the carpet on the foot pedals.   He charged $600.  Along with the organ he brought pages from an old catalog describing it: Packard Style 485 “Humanola” Chapel Organ, 1891-1904, mfg. by Ft. Wayne Organ Company, Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

It has been a fitting accessory to our log cabin, and played occasionally by grandchildren but seldom by me (should have kept that electric motor!)  None of the children have room for it, and eventually we will not be here.  It is time for the old Packard to return to its roots in southern Minnesota, and more specifically, to the Rognlie homeplace next to Ft. Ridgely and Dale Church.