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1936–2022
The instrument-maker test is negative; the church-music record, when it finally speaks, speaks in organs. The maker test was run as the checklist requires — makers who lived here, not instruments sold here — in Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907), in the Organ Historical Society's Pipe Organ Database, and in the congregations' own published histories: no organ builder, piano maker, or instrument maker of any kind is seated in the CDP in any source reached. The region's making happened across the county line, where Conn built brass at Elkhart; this ground bought its instruments, and the buying is documented to the pipe. St. Pius X, the parish whose line runs from the 1936 farm-chapel community to its formal establishment in 1956 (told whole in Religion), built its great church on Fir Road in 2017 and filled it with other cities' work: a Wicks organ — Wicks of Highland, Illinois — installed in the east transept in 2018, and beside it the parish's prize, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart's Holtkamp organ, donated by the University of Notre Dame in 2016. The Holtkamp's Granger course is the fullest church-music story this ground owns: the installing firm, AB Pipe Organ Company, went bankrupt a month after the Wicks was installed; music director Jeremy Hoy took fifteen parishioners to Chicago and recovered all of the pipes from three storage warehouses; Temple Organ Company of St. Joseph, Missouri, rebuilt the instrument — 55 ranks, more than 3,500 pipes — over some eighteen months in four installation segments; and Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades blessed it on May 22, 2022, with the basilica's own Karen Schneider-Kirner, the last person to have played it at Notre Dame at Christmas 2015, playing it again in its new loft. Of first church music in the older sense — a first choir, a first organist, a named singer — the congregations' published histories reached (St. Pius X's strategic plans and parish history; the Salem line in Religion) name none, for the farm century or the suburban one; Salem, the German Evangelical "Dutch Church" on Ash Road, carries no choir or music entry in its own surviving record as reached. That silence is printed as its result: the settler is the congregations' own archive — St. Pius X's parish files and Salem's congregational records — not any open source.
From Today's Catholic, May 28, 2022 (the Holtkamp blessing, read whole); the Organ Historical Society Pipe Organ Database, searched November 2026; Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907) for the maker test; Religion's St. Pius X and Salem entries for the congregational frame.