David Wallace seems to be right where he ought to be, sitting in his Gorham shop, which is really a lofty barn, complete with animals out back. Wallace and his team, including his son Nick, travel all over the country repairing, recovering, and building pipe organs, some of which are well over a century old.

David wallace plays in his shop

Upstairs the pieces of a pair of organs sit, either in the process of undergoing restoration or waiting for their turn at restoration. A gigantic bellows, designed to provide consistent airflow to organ pipes, has just been renewed so that it will continue to function as intended for another century.

Downstairs, a teenage girl, Gwen Rowland sits attached to her iPod, painstakingly re-crafting one of hundreds of tiny wood, leather and glue pieces that go into these intricate musical instruments. “It’s incredibly tedious,” says Wallace. But he explains the payoff for all that repetitive work is to hear these organs come alive.

You might expect that Wallace’s is a unique profession, but he says there are a lot of organ builders both large and small all over the country. Some of them are firms that have been making organs for well over a century. The American Institute of Organ Builders has three to four hundred members. In Europe, some companies have been building organs for two or three hundred years. Wallace says, “There are plenty of builders who are creating new organs. It’s labor-intensive because of all the intricate stuff that has to be created. Needless to say they’re wicked expensive.”

The first recorded pipe organ was built in 246 BC in Alexandria. Further enhancements resulted in the birth of the modern keyboard. Modern organ building dates from the 1390s. The sound of organs resonated through medieval churches and cathedrals long before the piano was invented.

Bellows under restoration in Wallace's shop

We sit down to talk in a room lined with framed photographs of organs which Wallace has either built or restored. He identifies each of them one at a time and explains their significance, and details his involvement with them. He built this one, moved that one, completely restored this other. Wallace has built three complete organs from scratch, but most of his business involved rebuilding instruments created by others, some well over a hundred years old.

Aroundmaine.com: Having torn down and restored organs by all these 19th century organ makers, you must have favorites.

Oh absolutely. This organ that we’re doing now was built by a builder name George Hutchings in Boston in 1883-1886. George Hutchings was a fantastically good builder. And his workmanship was first rate. Being called to have the prospect of re-building a Hutchings organ, we know it was built well in the first place which means it’s gong to be fairly easy to restore it and do what we have to do to put it back into playing order. The workmanship was first rate the materials he used were first rate. Things that were cut to be square and smooth a hundred years ago are still going to be that way today.

Aroundmaine.com: Where did you learn how to do this?

Wallace: I started off basically growing up with it. My Grandmother Wallace was an organist around Portland. I had organ lessons with her and piano lessons when I was a kid. I took lessons a little while with John Fay, who was the municipal organist back in the sixties when I was a teenager. So I had all this interest in it, and of course with my father being involved in the planning board in Portland, I had occasion to go in and kind of hang around with Burt Witham who was the caretaker of the Kotzschmar and watch what he was doing and really, the bug bit.

When I got to college I went to the Andover Organ Company in Methuen Massachusetts and went through their apprenticeship all the while I was in college. At that point in my life I never intended to make it a career. It was great fun it was wonderfully interesting and the people there at Andover were great to work with and I learned a lot.

Then I got drafted when I got out of college. I ran away to the Air Force because I didn’t want to go in the Army and I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. They sent me off to basic training and off to Vietnamese language school and I went off to Vietnam twice. I reenlisted and stayed in the Air Force (regular and reserve) 21 years and after Vietnam became an Arabic linguist. I retired right after Desert Storm.

When I came back to Maine, I was planning on being an earth sciences teacher… I landed back here the same time the city pulled the plug on the Kotzschmar and the Friends of the Kotzschmar group was formed. I got involved with that. Before too much time went by, I found myself full time in the organ business and that’s been 25 years.

Stevens Organ in East Machias, Maine

I prefer doing the old ones, There’s something immensely satisfying about taking an instrument that has, in many cases, been given up for dead as being just a hopeless case and being able to just meticulously go in and re-do every aspect of it and turning it into an organ that plays and makes music again.

Aroundmaine.com: When you replace parts that are made out of, for example, leather, do you replace them with leather or do you use more modern material?

Wallace: Leather. We use the same old stuff. This is genuine sheep hide. That’s what we use on the bellows and things like that. There was a period of time where the organ industry experimented with artificial materials and it didn’t work. The Kotzschmar had a whole bunch of the pneumatics in it that were done with a material called perflex. It’s basically the same thing that they make rubber gloves out of. It didn’t work. It tended to dry out and just fall apart. So far there’s no substitute for leather and there’s no substitute for good old-fashioned fish glue. It works. That bellows that we’ve just re-done upstairs will be good for a hundred years. We don’t expect these instruments to wear out for a century. There’s not a lot of stuff being built today that can make that claim.

Aroundmaine.com: What are the most important organs in Maine?

Maine's Oldest Pipe Organ - East Eddington

Wallace: In Maine, as far as historic importance, you’ve got the little unknown in East Eddington. We don’t know who built that, but we can date it to about 1829 because of the techniques and so forth that they used. The other is the one in Calais, another unknown instrument that was built 1829-1830. Of historic value, those are fabulous, for the really ancient instruments.

Other organs that are outstanding: There is an organ by the Hook Brothers in the South Congregational Church in Augusta that is absolutely magnificent. It is a stunning example of 19th century organ building. To come in the 20th century, the Kotzschmar is an outstanding instrument.

The instrument that’s in Saint Peter and Pauls in Lewiston by the Casavant company in Canada is another just stunning instrument. That’s from the 1930s, just a fabulous, well-built, beautiful sounding instrument in that huge space.

More recent instruments than that: the organ by Helmuth Wolff at Bates College, which was built in 1982, another stunning instrument, a French Classical organ. It ‘s gorgeous to look at, it’s gorgeous to hear and it’s wonderful to play.

They’re scattered all around. In Machias and East Machias there are two organs by George Stevens, a Boston builder, that are just wonderful instruments. We have had the pleasure of restoring the one in Machias, so that’s completely renewed and will go on for another hundred years.

The Organ Historical Society has a four CD set called “The Historic Organs of Maine.” You can find them online.

Aroundmaine.com: You did a lot of work on the Kotzschmar?

Inside the Kotzschmar Organ in Portland, Maine Click Here for more from inside the Kotzschmar

Wallace: That instrument has really been a trip. It was barely playable when we started. And then of course we did fifteen years worth of restorative work and come 1995 when they renovated the hall we had to take the whole organ out. We completely disassembled it and moved it into the old newspaper press building across the street and there it sat for a year, year and a half until the hall was done. Then we brought it all back and put it all back together again. It took us 28 days to disassemble it and take it out and it took us six months to put it all together again.

Aroundmaine.com: How many comparable instruments to the Kotzschmar are there?

Wallace: Lots. When this one was built in 1912, it was one of the largest organs in the world, but nowadays there are church organs in this country that are bigger than that in just sheer numbers of pipes and so forth. It’s a big organ and it’s the largest non-church organ in Maine, but the organ that I mentioned in Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, rivals that in size, in numbers of pipes and so forth.

Aroundmaine.com: Do you get mice running through these things?

Wallace: Oh yeah. We have mice chewing on things. We had an organ we repaired up in Belfast that had raccoons using the pipes in the organ as a staircase to get from the main floor up into the tower. There was a hole in the ceiling above the organ that the raccoons would go up and as they climbed the pipes of course they de-tuned everything. The organist couldn’t figure out why these two ranks of pipes kept going wildly out of tune.

We have an organ we take care of down at Saint James Episcopal down at Prout’s Neck. One summer the organist called and said, “I’ve got one note that is just totally out of tune,” the B flat below middle C. I’d go down and the note would be fine. There wouldn’t be a thing wrong with it. It would be perfectly in tune. He’d call me back and say, “That note’s out of tune again. It was fine when I went down to practice on Saturday, but on Sunday it was just totally out of tune.” Well what was happening in there was a chipmunk that was hauling in seeds from outside and storing them in that pipe. Sunday Morning this poor chipmunk would get caught in the organ. It would crawl into the nearest pipe it would fit into and hide in there. Of course a chipmunk stuck in the opening of a pipe would just throw it completely out of tune. And it would hide until the service was over and then it would leave and the pipe would be fine.

Aroundmaine.com: That’s hilarious!

Wallace: The stories are ..well, they’re endless. I think that every organ builder who has ever lived could contribute dozens of chapters to a massive work on just organ stories and organ mythologies that are out there. The things that have happened to me, my own personal experiences going back to my days as an apprentice at the Andover Organ Company.

We got a phone call from an organist down in Falmouth, Massachusetts and the organist said, “The organ stinks!” and the fellow who answered the phone said, “Well aside from your personal opinion can you be more specific?” And she said, “No it really stinks, there’s something rotting in the organ.”

Well a lot of times what will happen is bats will fly into the pipes and get stuck and can’t get out. We took thirty-eight bats, petrified, mummified bats, out of the organ in Augusta last summer. There were a number of high-school biology teachers that were thrilled with our find. So we thought a dead mouse, a dead rat, a dead bat, something like that.

It was not that at all.

At the rear of the organ, the tall pedal pipes, they stand tall at the end of the organ. Well the organ was in a chamber and at the rear of the organ was a balcony that came off the second floor Sunday school addition, just this tiny little balcony in the back of the organ chamber. No one knew why it was there. But some Sunday school kid had gone in, looking for the bathroom, couldn’t find one. He pulled the stopper out of one of those wooden pipes, sat upon the pipe and did his business and put the stopper back in. and sure enough when you started playing the pedal pipes, the stench was reminiscent of the outhouse at Baxter State Park on a hot summer day. Of course being the apprentice and the new kid, guess who had to climb in there and clean that mess out?

Aroundmaine.com: It almost seems as though you feel you’re stewards of these instruments.

Wallace: Very much so. I mean we drive to some far away places to maintain these instruments and if it were not the particular instrument that it is, I wouldn’t drive there. I wouldn’t go. Yeah I think there is definitely sort of a professional or a moral obligation to keep some of these old organs playing.

There’s not really any such thing as a wealthy organ builder. We do it because we love it and we try to make a good living at it and try to keep the bills paid.

LINKS David Wallace Organs The Organ Historical Society Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ