Bedient Pipe Organ Company
2024

While the pedalboard is flat and parallel, it has radiating sharps.

This entry represents the restoration and installation of a used organ. Identified from online information from Richard Parsons, and confirmed from the parish website and an Organ Media Foundation video of the removal and re-installation of the organ.

From the parish website, "As if to confirm this, yet another providential discovery was made: the organ. And not just any organ. In a Nebraska church literally on the verge of collapse stood a J.G. Pfeffer organ --identical in type, model, size and manufacture to the one originally at St. Ann --made only one year before our own.

In 2022, the Bedient Organ Company of Lincoln, Nebraska, contacted St. Ann with an incredible offer from a Lutheran church which had been closed for over 30 years. It had a 1901 Pfeffer organ in danger of being demolished. As miraculously as this organ had appeared and been offered, funds were quickly raised for its rescue. Bedient has confirmed that it is fully capable of being returned to its former glory.

J.G. Pfeffer, a German Catholic organ builder, built fine mechanical action organs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bedient Organ Company is the inheritor of the Pfeffer tradition of mechanical organ restoration. They have verified that this newly-rescued organ is the same size to fit in the original location here at St. Ann's. They expertly moved it to their shop, where it awaits restoration.

As a testimony to the fact that such organs were meant to last for centuries, and in spite of the deplorable conditions in which it was found, it still played! The Pfeffer organ original to St. Ann, still in its prime, was removed in 1948, and likely thrown away, after having been played for only 46 years. That Margaret Downey memorial Organ was the center of a number of concerts, noted in local papers."