First music: the churches and the first organ

1848 — the nineteenth century

Sacred first: Fort Wayne's documented music begins, as it did in most American towns, in church. The earliest documented church organ in the city is the small four-stop instrument owned by Trinity Episcopal Church in 1848 and installed in its first building at Berry and Harrison streets. In 1863 the Rev. Stephen H. Battin established Trinity's first choir, at a cost of thirty dollars. The parish replaced its organ in 1867–68 with an instrument by John Marklove of Utica, New York, and again in 1892 with a Henry Pilcher's Sons organ, the same year it introduced a vested choir of men and boys in the English choral tradition; by the early 1900s, under organist Fred Church, that boys' choir was one of the largest in the city and drew boys from across Fort Wayne whether or not their families belonged to the parish. Trinity's line is simply the best documented; the German Lutheran and Catholic parishes were building their own musical traditions in the same decades — German was the ordinary language of sermon, schoolroom, and street in much of the city — and the Lutheran organ tradition planted then is one root of the city's durable pipe-organ culture, carried today in events such as the "Follow the Pipes" organ crawl held during the Three Rivers Festival. The congregations, their buildings, and their schools are treated in the Religion record; what belongs here is that the city's first music institution was a choir loft. (The Music section of the city's wider record begins from this point; the standard local survey is Eugene L. Bulson's paper "Fort Wayne's Place in the Music World," written for the Quest Club and held by the Allen County Public Library.)

Sources:

1. Trinity Episcopal Church, parish history, "Music and Choir" (scalar.usc.edu/works/trinity-history) — the 1848 four-stop organ, the 1863 choir at $30, the 1867 Marklove and 1892 Pilcher's Sons organs, the vested choir, and the boys' choir under Fred Church.
2. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), German Heritage in Allen County — the German-language church and club culture, and "Follow the Pipes" at the Three Rivers Festival, quoting the Rev. Paul Grime of Concordia Theological Seminary on the city's German Lutheran organ roots.
3. The Quest for Fort Wayne (Allen County Public Library, 1994), contents — Eugene L. Bulson, "Fort Wayne's Place in the Music World," the fourteen-page survey of the city's early music held in the ACPL Digital Collections.