Just over a month ago, on the evening of August 4, a few dozen chairs were set out in the entry hall for Parlor Music at Hildene, The Lincoln Family Home. Rachel Clemente played harp, Dr. Alastair Stout played piano and the organ, and between pieces, Gary Parzych, Hildene's Exhibits and Collections Director, told stories about the family who once made and listened to music in these rooms. The setting was purposefully intimate. The Lincolns likely would not have performed for a crowd, Gary says, and even thirty-some chairs is more than they would have set out, but sitting this close to the pipes, "you're almost inside the music."
Most guests do not need a concert ticket to feel that. The Lincolns' Aeolian organ plays throughout the day for everyone who tours the home, and Gary has watched the same thing happen at the console more times than he can count. "When people see it for the first time, or hear it for the first time, their eyes light up," he says. "It is pretty magical to hear the same music in the same home, through the same pipes, that the Lincolns would have heard."
The organ was installed in the entrance hall in 1908, a gift from Robert Lincoln to his wife, Mary Harlan Lincoln. Its 933 pipes fill the two chambers on either side of the landing window, and it is believed to be one of the oldest residential pipe organs with a player attachment in the United States still in its original location and still in working order. Because it plays daily, it is also one of the most frequently heard organs in the country. "That is one of the unique features about our organ versus other pipe organs that are still operational," says Nan Bambara, Hildene's Advancement Director. "It is accessible to everybody who comes and tours." On the busiest foliage days, close to a thousand guests might hear it before closing.
The organ came with its music. It was built with a player attachment, and the family bought a library of paper rolls from the Aeolian catalog the same year. All 242 of those rolls remain in the collection, and together they are a record of what an evening in this hall sounded like. "Everything from classical to religious to popular music from the time, patriotic anthems, and holiday," Gary says. "A lot of waltzes." The family kept adding to the instrument, too: in 1915, two new stops arrived, a Harp and a Vox Humana.
Specifically where the family sat to listen is not exactly known, but Gary suspects the sitting rooms, the bedrooms, the parlor, and perhaps the bench on the stair landing itself, set between the two chambers where the sound is fullest. If they did sit there, he thinks the style of play would have been gentle. A person at the console can do things the rolls cannot, going very soft and very loud with real drama, but on the landing it was probably "something much softer."
It would be easy to assume that what guests hear today is a recording played through a speaker hidden behind the pipes. It is not. While Hildene's original player attachment stopped working long ago, in 1997 a computer-driven system took its place. The music it plays was captured by running the rolls through another organ with a working player, where a machine recorded the electrical signals (never the sound) as each roll passed through. Back at Hildene, those signals open the same valves, send wind from the same blower through the same bellows, and speak through the same 933 pipes. "It's actually still the bellows, the wind," Nan says. "It's still moving through the system as it would have in 1908." One disc in the library holds the playing of a local musician who sat at the console in the 1980s, captured the same way. Play it and the organ performs with every swell and hesitation he gave it, as if he were still there.
Choosing what songs play each day ultimately falls to specially trained docents. They curate selections accordingly, sometimes for a specific season or mood. Gary has favorites all the same. "The Santiago Waltz is probably my favorite song." His favorite part of the instrument is one that guests rarely notice. Look closely into the chambers and discover that some of the tallest pipes make a ninety-degree turn to fit under the ceiling; a design compromise to fit such large components into the confined space.
The organ has gone silent once already. When Friends of Hildene purchased the property in 1978, it had not played in decades. The blower would not start, and mice and carpet beetles had destroyed nearly everything around the main chest. After Hildene's extensive search for the right person, Vermont organ builder Larry Nevin proposed what he later called "an educated gamble": that with minimal repairs, it could sound again in time for Hildene's first public opening. Friends of Hildene announced the project before it had the money and asked for help. An anonymous donor answered the newsletter appeal with a pledge of $6,000 toward the estimated $10,000, and others followed. Work began in November 1979 and ran through the winter. On the evening of May 15, 1980, by Larry's account, the organ sounded for the first time in forty years. The bill came to $10,819, funded almost entirely by donors, and Larry has climbed into the chambers every year since.
His most recent assessment, in January 2025, found the organ sound for daily use for now, but that the 1980 repairs are reaching the end of what they can do. The bellows he re-leathered 45 years ago need new leather once again. Nearly a thousand valves need rebuilding. The shutters on the Great side, removed in 1980 so guests could see the pipes, need to be made and installed again. Every pipe needs to come out to be cleaned, repaired, and voiced, the console and controls rebuilt, and the rest of the rolls converted so the whole library can be heard. Larry's estimate for the complete project is $298,000, in three phases, beginning with the console and player.
Gary is careful with the words. "Restored sounds so much prettier," he says, "but to keep this organ playing into the next century, there are components to the organ that will not survive through restoration." Some of the original leather is more than a century old, and parts will have to be rebuilt. Before the campaign began, he asked Larry whether the work was in keeping with what Friends of Hildene hoped for when they chose him in 1979. Larry reassured him and cautioned what would happen otherwise. As Gary recalls it: "If this work isn't done, the organ will continue to live for a while, and eventually as it starts to break down, it will die a slow death again."
"He's performed open heart surgery on it before," Nan says. "If we can have that same surgeon do it, that seems like the right move to make." Part of the goal is making sure someone learns from him along the way, so the person caring for the organ fifty years from now was taught by the person who saved it. The campaign was planned over three years because of what it will cost. Now at the end of the first year, Hildene has raised roughly a third of the goal, which puts it on pace, and the organ keeps playing while the rest comes in. "It's not broken yet," Nan says. "It's such a nice feeling that we've gotten ahead of it."
A gift of any size to the Organ Restoration Campaign goes directly to this work. Nan has a second request, for readers familiar with the organ world. "If someone's a real enthusiast and they know of a publication or a website or a blog or a Facebook group that's full of other organ enthusiasts, we'd love to tell our story."
Gary reaches for a comparison when he tries to explain what the organ does to a room. "In the same way that when you get hit with a smell that you remember from childhood, it transports you somewhere." It is the same thing that our Christmas of 1912 program does each December, placing guests in the time and the place. "Surrounding you, immersing you, bathing you."
Some things at Hildene can be photographed or recorded, and carried home. The true sound of the organ is not one of them. Its sound exists only in that hall, between those two chambers, and only while someone is standing there to hear it. The family knew that when they set out to construct such an instrument. The donors who answered a newsletter appeal in 1979 knew it. Larry Nevin has known it every year since. Come stand in the hall when it begins. You will be hearing what Mary heard when it was new, and what a guest fifty years from now will hear because someone today decided to get involved in this campaign. For a few minutes, you'll be inside the times, and inside the music.
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The Lincolns' Aeolian organ plays daily during touring hours at Hildene, The Lincoln Family Home. To support the Organ Restoration Campaign, or to help share the organ's story, contact Nan Bambara, Advancement Director, at nan@hildene.org or 802-367-7994. Visit hildene.org to plan your visit.
