Built in England in the 1980s, the newly rededicated Wood Organ spent its first decades in the chapel at First Baptist, where it served the church well. Because of the limited scale of the chapel, however, the organ had to be installed on a side wall between two windows where it was subjected to drafts and high temperatures with some of the pedalwork buried in the floor. After a very successful fundraising campaign, it was given new life in the sanctuary in 2024 and rededicated to the late Barclay Wood, longtime Minister of Music and the Arts at The First Baptist Church. Stefan Meier and his firm evolved the instrument from the lovely core that the Walker Organ Company had built to a fully historical baroque instrument of a type and tuning-system that would have been very familiar to Bach. It serves now as a window into the sounds of the past and a powerful component of worship and performance in the sanctuary.

The Great Organ was built by Reuter just over sixty years ago and received a new console from Russell in 1999. When it was built, it was the largest instrument Reuter had ever constructed east of the Mississippi. Over the past two generations it has received attentive care and thoughtful expansion, and stands now as a wonderful example of American Eclectic organ building. An instrument designed to fill the barrel-vault of the sanctuary and accompany many hundreds of voices, the organ was also intended to move flexibly between German, French, English, and Italian repertoire while also representing classic elements of American organ building. It is an instrument of immense size and power with thousands of pipes and high-pressure winding systems. Bach was known to test an organ’s “lungs” by pulling out all of the stops and depressing many keys and pedals at once, and the Great Organ would surely pass with flying colors!