The organ maker and the first church music: Van Dinter's Mishawaka

CHURCH MUSIC AT ANCHOR SIZE · BEFORE 1850 TO 1915 AND AFTER

Mishawaka once built organs. The gazetteer record carried in the Businesses section of this history lists, among the manufactures of a town of some 3,200 people, Louis VanDinter, manufacturer of organs — one line in a directory, printed there at the size the directory gives it, and the only organ builder the city's record names. The line would be a curiosity if the church record did not meet it. St. Paul's Episcopal Church — organized 20 April 1837, the oldest formally organized parish in its diocese — kept the city's first documented church music: its leaders brought the first organ reportedly from Saratoga Springs, New York, sometime before 1850, and later installed a Van Dinter pipe organ, manufactured in Mishawaka, worked by a hand air pump, which was in time moved to the new church building with some of the stained glass. The same parish history follows the instrument's successors — the Van Dinter replaced by one of the early electric organs, and that by a later model given by Miss Neitzel; the organ itself moved from the front of the church to its present place at the rear, enlarging the chancel. The parish's choir stands in the diocesan archives in a photograph of Palm Sunday 1915, and its later course carries a boys' choir organized under Winifred Wonderlick, a music teacher at Bingham School — the church choir and the school music room already sharing personnel, as they would for the rest of the century.

Beyond St. Paul's, the church-music record thins quickly, and the thinness is printed rather than filled. The Religion record of this history digs Mishawaka's congregations whole — the Belgian parish of St. Bavo, the German congregations, the motherhouse chapel of the Sisters of St. Francis with its unbroken adoration — and organ-and-choir institutions at naming strength do not rise out of it: no second church organ is documented as an institution, no parish choir with a course of directors, no organ recital series. What stands is a beginning of unusual completeness for a small city: a first organ imported before 1850, a hometown builder to succeed it, and a choir on film — on glass, rather — by 1915.

Sources:

1. Episcopal Diocese of Northern Indiana Archives (Scalar/USC hosting), St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Mishawaka, parish history and the choir photograph of Palm Sunday 1915 — the Saratoga Springs organ before 1850, the Van Dinter organ manufactured in Mishawaka and its successors, the choir's enlargement, the boys' choir under Winifred Wonderlick.
2. The Businesses record of this history — the gazetteer listing of Louis VanDinter, manufacturer of organs, in the town of 3,200.
3. The Religion record of this history — the congregations whole, against which the absence of further named organ/choir institutions is measured.