Our organ is of the type known as a ‘chapel organ’, designed for smaller spaces and venues and therefore exactly right for Henton. Unfortunately this wasn’t successful, and the company finally went out of business in the early 1960s.Įstey produced a wide range of models, from small ‘cottage organs’ to quite large instruments. The business declined in the 1950s with the advent of electronic organs, which Estey did have a shot at producing. In fact, Estey produced an ‘Acclimatized’ organ specifically for use in hot and humid climates, and these were much used by missionaries in Africa, Central America, and elsewhere.ĭuring the Second World war, every US Army chaplain was issued with an Estey ‘field organ’ small, very simply constructed from plain timber, painted battleship grey and designed to fold up to be stowed in the back of a Jeep! The Estey factory in Brattleboro, VermontĮstey exported very widely and would certainly have had distributors and retailers in England.
Twenty years later, production was running at 13,000 organs a year and the company had built over 300,000 organs by the turn of the 19th/20th century. By 1869, production exceeded 300 instruments per month. However, over the rest of the 19th Century and well into the 20th, Estey became and remained for many years the largest manufacturer of reed organs in the world. The Estey company (which originally made melodeons) was founded in 1852 by Jacob Estey, and their manufacturing base was indeed Brattleboro, Vermont. of Brattleboro, Vermont’ĭuring subsequent chats with other volunteers, I heard it said that they found it quite surprising and puzzling that an organ made in an obscure part of the North-Eastern United States should find its way to the middle of the English countryside. ‘Interior fittings: The organ is an American Reed Organ, made by F Estey & Co.
When I joined as a volunteer a few months ago, and was diligently reading through and trying to absorb the information in the buildings’ briefing documents, something jumped out at me from the information on the Henton ‘Tin Tabernacle’ chapel:
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