GORHAM, Maine — You don’t have to travel back in time to find a pipe organ builder. If you live in Gorham, you might wait in line next to one at the grocery store.
In a busy shop next to the family farmhouse on County Road, Nick Wallace, 39, and his father, David Wallace, 76, have made hand-crafting and restoring the instruments their life’s work. They are the only business in Maine they know of to still practice the trade.
Though a common assumption is that dwindling organ playing and church attendance means organ building is a fading industry, work for their business — David E. Wallace & Co. Pipe Organ Builders — is far from dried up. Proposals for projects across the country, and sometimes the world, pile into a backlog, they say, and their phone rings often with requests for tunings and repairs. Churches, concert halls and schools still want organs that sound good, look beautiful and preserve history.
“The general public is still often mystified by it, but it’s not a dying art,” Nick Wallace said, surrounded by piles of lumber that will shape into thousands of vital organ parts, rows of hand-crafted metal pipes waiting for wax and pencil drawings that stretch large tabletops. “Organs are being built better than they ever have been before.”
The organ pipeline
David Wallace’s grandmother was an organist, and he grew up attending organ concerts at Merrill Auditorium, then called Portland City Hall Auditorium. He developed a fascination with the music and inner workings of the Kotzschmar organ there, an instrument he would later become the caretaker of. In May, he and Nick answered an urgent call to build a new wind chest for the instrument to replace one that was “leaking” and “hissing” just before internet sensation organist Anna Lapwood arrived to perform on the instrument.
Though David’s original plan was to become a high school science teacher, an internship with a Boston-area organ maker changed his course. He founded his business in 1982, doing restorations of 19th-century pieces, and began building new mechanical organs once Nick joined him.
Nick grew up around the shop, then majored in classical guitar and took organ lessons at the University of Southern Maine. Having never known a world that didn’t include organ building, he said it’s hard to say how long he’s been at it.
“I think it was probably more obvious to people around me where things were heading,” Nick said. “I started spending more time in the shop in college, and one thing led to another, and it was not long before I designed my first organ case.”
The younger Wallace now primarily runs the business, overseeing the design and production, while David tackles administrative and business tasks. David tried to retire years ago to travel the world with his wife, Kathy, but returned to the craft to keep busy after she died of cancer in 2023.
Chord-ial patience
Organ building, Nick Wallace said, is characterized by “delayed gratification.” Every piece presents them with new challenges, but most of the process is slow and monotonous.
Their current project is a 20-foot-tall, 1,795-pipe organ for St. Stanislaus Catholic Church in Nashua, New Hampshire. They started work on it about six months ago, and the structure hasn’t reached the point of resembling an instrument — they still have a year of work before it will be playable.
“We can’t speed through stuff,” David said. “We don’t want to speed through stuff.”
To design and hand-make each part takes time and an extensive range of skills, including metalworking, woodworking and leatherworking. They need sharp eyes for precise measurements, the diligence to drill hundreds of holes the same way and a well-trained ear to hear if the pipes are the right size — they use a workbench with a keyboard to test them out for pitch.
The Wallaces are rarely the shop’s sole employees. Mostly by happenstance, they’ve found several helpers and apprentices to train over the years, some of whom have gone off to start organ building careers of their own.
Rebecca Schnell, 72, has been working with the Wallaces for nine years, after leaving her long-held role as a choir director, most recently at Woodford’s Congregational Church in Portland. She had done some organ tuning alongside David there before expressing an interest in learning how to build the massive instrument from scratch.
“I would have done this much earlier if I knew it existed,” Schnell said, bending over measurements on a map of the Nashua organ’s key action, which links a pedal to the valve that allows air into a pipe to make a sound.
Ryan Slocum, 24, is an apprentice with the Wallaces who studied organ playing at USM. He first encountered the pair when he went to the Corthell Concert Hall on the Gorham campus for practice, anticipating its organ would be available (there was only one other organ student there at the time). But it wasn’t — the Wallaces were there, doing some maintenance work. They piqued his interest.
Two years later, he’s become skilled in several aspects of organ playing, learning new components each day.
“It’s opened my eyes a lot,” Slocum said. “There’s a lot more you can do with music while still being hands-on.”
The term Nick used to describe their role is “artist engineer.”
“The art part is, you have to love what you do,” David said. “You have to want to get up at 4 in the morning to come out and sit down and figure out why you can’t get from point A to point B.”
Keying up for the road
Though most of the Wallaces’ work happens in their tiny rural shop, they take on organ projects all over the United States, and sometimes, the world.
Nick lived in Washington, D.C., for almost three months last year to assemble an organ for a church on Capitol Hill. They’ve done work in Atlanta, Ancaster, Ontario, and even Boom, Belgium — some components of that Europe-bound instrument came from an organ originally at State Street Congregational Church in Portland.
Though many New England churches are closing or being repurposed, the Wallaces said more are opening in southern states, and new concert halls and schools in need of organs are popping up in Europe and Asia. The knowledge of how to build organs is well-preserved by national and international organizations, but there’s a scarcity of businesses that can meet the demand, they said.
Prices for a new organ or restoration, not including the cost of travel, usually range from $250,000 to $750,000.
The first step of their process is to visit the instrument they are rebuilding or replacing to disassemble it, part by part. They outsource crews that help them with that labor-intensive, often “filthy” process — mice had used one organ they worked on as a free-range toilet.
“You’re right there with the coal miners at the end of the work day,” David said.
Even after an organ is complete and re-installed, they return routinely, conducting check-ins to tune and make sure the instrument is in good shape. David said to travel and hear an organ he’s worked on play the way they intended makes every step worth the wait.
“To go to Washington now and listen to what that organ sounds like and what the new stop that we labored over with 100 clamps on one pipe to hold the glue together, to hear what that stop contributes to that organ now is just, ‘Wow,’” David said. “You sit there and listen to it, and you think of all the stuff that went into it.”
For Nick, though, the best part of completing a project is returning to a clean, empty shop — a blank slate with room for the next.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Madeleine Kaptein can be reached at mkaptein@metln.org.