How a Civil War-era organ came to play music again

By Steve Young, for Pigeon605

The phone call came out of the blue, quite unexpected, and David Walder paused for a moment when the voice at the other end asked him about something called the “Walder organ.”

The Walder what, he thought as the question bounced about in his brain.

It didn’t take long, and he was traveling back in time, transported by the vision of a memory he had not visited in decades. Suddenly, David Walder was not 81 years old anymore, but 4, maybe 5, sitting on the floor in the old farmhouse on the Walder homestead northeast of Hayti in the late 1940s, listening to his aunt Emily drawing beautiful music from the reeds of a little pump organ.

An Estey Flat Top Cottage Organ, it turns out, that had been manufactured shortly after the Civil War ─ 153 years ago this year, in fact­, by the Estey Organ Co. in Brattleboro, Vermont. The same organ that had spent the past 142 years sharing its songs on the Dakota prairie.

That Walder organ.

“So what do you want to do with it?” asked Danny Olsen, a Hayti-area farmer whose family now owned the former Walder homestead and whose ties to the Walder family had left him in possession of this old, decrepit shell of wood and ivory.

The easy answer, as it is for most things that have lost their usefulness over time, would have been to relegate it to an organ scrapyard. For it didn’t appear it could speak in the language of music anymore.

But Estey, as Walder calls the keyboard instrument now, still had a voice as far as he was concerned ─ one that resonated with the melodies of family history, of family memories, of binding at least six generations of Walders together by its very existence.

Estey had come to Dakota Territory from Baraboo, Wisconsin, by immigrant train and arrived near present-day Watertown when signs of great buffalo herds roaming the prairies still existed. When isolated bands of tribal people still traveled the countryside. When farming was the province of heavy plows, teams of horses or oxen, and the resolve to fight on through locust plagues and droughts.

Estey was offering its music when Dakota Territory became South Dakota. It played across the ages as dirt trails evolved into highways and then interstates. As America went to war in Europe, twice, and then Japan and Korea and Vietnam. As mankind went to the moon and back. Estey was there for every celebration of a Walder birth, every tear that fell over an open Walder grave and every meaningful gathering in between.

And so, after David Walder consulted with cousins and relatives about how to answer Olsen’s question, it was decided: They were going to bring Estey back to life again and preserve it.

“It was important to me to do that,” Walder saod. “Important to my cousins, too, once I visited with them. I’m notorious for holding on to things. And this, this was an organ I listened to once. And that was enough for me.”

This organ is the embodiment of the Dakota story. Walder’s great-grandparents Godfrey and Anna Walder received it as a wedding gift from her parents when they married in the fall of 1871.

Some years before that, Godfrey had walked 150 miles from his home in southern Wisconsin to Chicago to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War but was rejected because he was 4 feet, 11 inches tall. Destiny led him to Anna Trautman instead, and working the land had no height limitations. So they farmed in Sauk County, Wisconsin, for 10 years with moderate success. Then in the fall of 1881, 39-year-old Godfrey Walder caught Dakota fever after hearing industrious German neighbors had done well in Dakota Territory and so set a new course for their future.

Godfrey and Anna bought the Frank Bradley farm 2 3/4 miles south of Watertown for $6,000 that fall of 1881. The next spring, they took the immigrant train from Wisconsin ─ a driving distance of 450 miles ─ and brought wagons, machinery, horses, cows, chickens and white turkeys to their new home.

And, of course, the Walder organ.

David Walder’s great-grandmother Anna came from a well-educated background, steeped in literature and music, and most certainly played Estey. Godfrey and Anna’s daughter, Emily ─ one of five children born to the family ─ was an accomplished organist too.

In the late 1800s, the pump organ was the only such instrument in the prairie neighborhood stretching from Watertown to Hayti and so was used for miscellaneous music gatherings and occasionally for dances. Neighbors, the Mungers, were even allowed to hoist it with a hay rope up into the haymow for barn dances.

Walder can only speculate on the music Estey shared. Patriotic songs, perhaps. Though not an overly religious family, the Walders may have performed hymns on it. There is old sheet music and books that have survived the decades as well with titles like “Rubber Plant Rag,” “Salome Waltzes,” “Take Me Back to Dear Old Dixie” and “Serenade” by Schubert.

Estey lived with the Walders in their farmhouse south of Watertown from 1882 to 1888. When difficult financial times cost them their farm, they moved just north of Watertown, where Godfrey worked for a rancher named Emil Schlieker until he saved enough money to try farming on his own again.

So it was that in 1893, the Walders bought a place a mile east and two miles north of what would become present-day Hayti. And there in that farmhouse, Estey remained for most of the next 129 years.

David Walder, who spent 35 years teaching junior English at Brookings High School before retiring, grew up on a farm one-quarter mile west and maybe one-quarter mile north of his great-grandparents’ place. By the time his memories begin in earnest, Godfrey and Anna were deceased, and their son Alex was living on the Walder homestead with his wife, Sadie, and Alex’s sister, Emily.

As a small boy, David Walder would wander up the hill to Alex and Sadie’s place, where he knew a plate of brownies and a glass of Kool-Aid might be waiting for him. Aunt Emily lived upstairs, and Sadie would call her down when the boy came to visit. Emily had a set of lead soldiers that Walder liked to play with. And at least once, she performed on the organ for him down on the main floor, though the organ occasionally stayed upstairs with Emily.

“I don’t even remember what the song was,” Walder said. “But that memory is very clear to me.”

Over the ensuing years, the organ stayed upstairs with Emily at the homestead place. When she died in 1975, Estey remained at the house. Sadie, whose maiden name was Olsen before she married Alex, sold the Walder homestead to her nephew Dale Olsen in the mid-1970s. For the next 40-plus years, the Olsens became the caretakers for the organ. Dale Olsen’s wife, Deanna, regularly played it, and Estey became known as the Walder-Olsen organ.

Who else might have played it is less clear to David Walder. Apparently, in time, its music went silent. The intricacies of the old pump organ ceased working ─ age had overcome its parts and function.

Thus, the phone call from Dale Olsen’s son, Danny, to Walder in the spring of 2022.

What to do with Estey? Walder’s inclination was to preserve it and perhaps find a home for it in a museum in Hayti or Watertown. Maybe the National Music Museum in Vermillion would be interested in it.

Though none of those possibilities panned out, there certainly was a consensus among Walder’s relatives that Estey should not go to the scrapyard. A cousin in North Carolina valued the old organ a great deal, Walder said. So did a rancher cousin near Vivian, who had played the church organ there for many years. And other relatives were equally wanting to hold on to the organ.

“I kind of learned instantly after I started inquiring with the cousins … that the rebuild would be what we all wanted,” Walder said.

That decision, and a few more phone calls, led Walder to Marty Larsen and Marty’s Services in Hurley. A machinist by trade, Larsen had worked 20 years for J.F. Nordlie’s organ-making venture in Sioux Falls. When that job ended, he cast about for a short time with a number of work opportunities before settling on his own organ repair and rebuild venture in Hurley beginning in about 2004.

While he has revitalized many organs through the years, Larsen said the Walder-Olsen Estey was one of the oldest pump organs he has ever encountered. He worked on one that’s at a museum in Freeman that reportedly was built in 1865. He also has tackled repairs on pipe organs, including a historical rebuild of one that was built circa 1785 in southern Bavaria and now sits in a museum in Viborg.

In reality, Larsen said, rebuilding or repairing pump organs typically doesn’t happen unless they have a long family history.

“It needs to be like a family heirloom,” he said. “If you were to go out and find one that needed to be rebuilt, they usually aren’t worth much. You might pay $50 to $100 for it, or it might be given to you. But it costs many more times than that to rebuild them and to bring them back to what they were, virtually brand-new. For most people with no history with it, it’s not worth it.”

Though the Walder-Olsen organ is at most worth a few hundred dollars, Walder had no trouble getting contributions from relatives to fund Estey’s makeover. It wasn’t cheap. Larsen said he had to restore the organ from the ground up. He releathered the bellows and the reservoir for the foot pumps. He rebushed the keys. He redid seals.

There aren’t many who repair pump organs these days, Larsen said. “It’s not complicated,” he said, adding, “but it has to be done right. You have to get a reed organ sealed up right because it’s different from a pipe organ. A pipe organ is wind pressure, and a reed organ like David’s is a vacuum machine. It actually pulls air through. They were designed for parlors and small chapels because instead of blowing air out for sound, which would make more sound, they suck in air through the reeds.”

The refurbished Estey was delivered to Larsen on Oct. 23, 2022, in Sioux Falls, Walder said. Walder and another cousin, Kenny Everson, picked up the restored organ Aug. 3, 2023. It now resides at Everson’s place right outside of Hayti — its future yet to be decided even as its music emanates again.

There has been talk of a family gathering this summer where relatives come from near and far to take their turns with the restored pump organ. There has been a conversation as well about leaving it at Everson’s for now, with the offer to family and friends passing through to stop in and spend time with the beloved organ whenever they want.

The latter is probably not the final answer, Walder concedes. But for now, the 153-year-old family heirloom is reborn and has a new home. It is speaking again in the language of music. And its very being remains a constant reminder to the Walders and the Olsens and all their relatives about how far they have come on the Dakota prairie.

And so there has been a partial answer to Danny Olsen’s question to David Walder. At some point in the longer term, Walder is convinced they will figure out what to do with it.

“I’ve kind of hit a wall with ideas, but I know there’s a solution out there,” he said. “It will come to us. For right now, we’re content to let the old girl rest at Kenny Everson’s until we get a little smarter.”