Orrville's Schantz Organ Company turning 150
The Schantz Organ Company leadership team of John Schantz, left, Eric Gastier, Victor Schantz, Jeffrey Dexter and Luke Tegtmeier are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Orrville business this month.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart called the organ the king of instruments in the 1700s.
Like countless others before him and continuing to this very day, Mozart was captivated by the organ’s sound.
In 1873 Abraham John Tschantz founded what today is the Schantz Organ Company. He too was captivated by the organ.
This spring the Schantz Organ Company is celebrating its 150th anniversary and will offer an open house celebration with free admission on April 29 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at its factory located at 626 S. Walnut St. in Orrville.
Schantz Organ Company’s staff now includes members of its fourth and fifth generations, leading one of Wayne County’s most remarkable success stories.
The business, which has remained through advances in technology and changes in world affairs, is one of the top five organ companies in the U.S.
“My great-grandfather was a quintessential entrepreneur,” said Victor B. Schantz, company president. “He was one of those fellas that embraced steam technology and then electricity, which was revolutionary.
“His ability to create things is the legacy of the company, whereas my grandfather, my father and I have all basically had the same job of managing a workshop of artisans making musical instruments.”
The Schantz Organ Company has built and installed more than 3,000 pipe organs across the United States, as well as Australia.
It can take anywhere from three months to a year to build one organ. Just one organ can cost over $1 million, and pipes can be as tall as 32 feet inside of church cathedrals.
Schantz Organs have been played in churches of every denomination, as well as concert halls, hospital chapels, Masonic Temples, sanitariums, synagogues, orphanages, residences and even a penitentiary chapel.
Abraham J. Tschantz (1849-1921) started out building “Ohio Beauty” reed organs on his family farm located near Kidron. He soon transitioned to building pipe organs and constructed his first shop in Orrville in 1875.
The spelling of the family name was changed to Schantz in 1899.
After assisting with the installation of a Votteler pipe organ in Winesburg in 1872, Abraham Tschantz knew the direction he wanted to take the company.
“Mr. Votteler was a German immigrant organ builder from Cleveland, and his firm was coming to Winesburg and he needed some assistance,” said Jeffrey Dexter, Schantz vice president and tonal director and also the musical director at Zion Lutheran Church in Wooster. “The area people knew that young Mr. Tschantz was a very mechanical guy who was raised on a dairy farm and was a good worker.
“Abraham had been very successful building reed organs, which you might see in your grandmother’s parlor and you pump your feet when you play it. But when he assisted Votteler, he thought, ‘This is more interesting. This is more complex. This is what I want to be doing.’ And he started to build pipe organs after that.”
That original Votteler Organ Abraham worked on is still played today at the Zion Reform Church in Winesburg, and Schantz Organ regularly services it.
The pipe organ is a wind instrument played from a keyboard. Because every building that houses a Schantz Organ is different, every design and installation has to be customized to its surroundings.
To build a pipe organ, a number of different skills are blended. The tour of the Schantz Organ Company will show departments in which craftspeople skilled in architecture, metallurgy, woodworking, and the physics of sound and music work together.
Vice President Eric Gastier has been the staff architect since 1992. Dexter has been the tonal director, also called the artistic director, since 1996.
Building pipe organs and servicing them is a niche. When Dexter is asked what he does for a living, he’s frequently asked, “People still build pipe organs?”
“When I was a kid and learning how to play the organ, I was just as interested in what was in the organ chamber as I was with what was found with the music desk,” Dexter said. “It was a fascination with ‘how does this work?’ There’s so many different parts. You walk around our workshop and you see many different disciplines working together in order to make this musical instrument come to life.”
Luke Tegtmeier, a 2001 Northwestern High School graduate, is the service manager but also plays many other roles within the company.
“I attended the 125th Schantz Organ anniversary as a kid,” Tegtmeier said. “After attending college, I worked for a small organ builder in Columbus. It’s been really fun to get to grow with a bigger company here.”
Schantz Organ now has 34 full-time employees and annually services several hundred organs throughout Ohio and the U.S. The company also builds an average of about three new organs a year and restores historic instruments.
“We tune or restore organs our company has built and also ones from other companies,” Tegtmeier said.
The oldest Schantz pipe organ in use today is an all-mechanical instrument built in 1904 for the Second United Church of Christ in Tiffin.
Major restorations include the large 1929 instrument at Severance Hall in Cleveland, which was restored in 2000. In summer 2022 Schantz restored the 1963 Aeolian-Skinner, located at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
Visitors to the open house will be able to see how organ pipes are made and tuned, what a blower looks like, how the mechanism causes the pipes to play, and a CNC machine making parts. Guests will have an opportunity to take home free souvenirs, and several food trucks will be onsite.
For more information about Schantz Organ and to see additional pictures, visit its Facebook page.
“We all feel a strong sense of legacy, wanting to keep something going that was done well in the first place,” Victor Schantz said. “For me to have my son (comptroller John P. Schantz) here with me and representing a fifth generation, we’re proud to have been able to adapt over the years.
“It’s a privilege to be able to have people working at things that they love to do. What we’re maintaining here is a type of an art form that is unique and that people really enjoy doing. To be able to keep that going is a wonderful thing.”
Aaron Dorksen can be emailed at aarondorksen24@gmail.com.