Leesburg Churches’ Pipe Organs on Display

The pipe organs of Leesburg’s downtown churches usually get their main workout on Sunday mornings. On May 22, the majestic organs boomed again during the afternoon for an appreciative audience of more than 100 local residents who toured five downtown churches on Leesburg’s first “pipe organ crawl.”

Pipe organ crawls, in which people visit several instruments in the course of one event, are a long-standing tradition among organists, according to event organizers. In Europe, a crawl might last for days, going from city to city.

Leesburg’s crawl, on the other hand, lasted about 2½ hours and featured visits to five churches, four of which presented brief organ recitals – Leesburg Presbyterian Church, Leesburg United Methodist Church, St. James’ Episcopal Church and Holy Trinity Lutheran Church.

Those who attended received a mini-history lesson at each church and had the opportunity to compare several beautiful, diverse worship spaces.  They also learned about the history and features of the organs in each church.

Leesburg Presbyterian Church, located on West Market Street in a building dating back to 1804, has an organ that has evolved over the decades.  It was upgraded most recently in the 1990s and features parts from two previous incarnations of the organ.

A block away on Market Street, Leesburg United Methodist Church has an organ that was constructed by Randall Dyer & Associates and installed in the mid-1980s.  The church building dates to 1852.

Saint James’ Episcopal Church is located in Cornwall Street in a Norman-style edifice that was constructed in 1895.  The organ, a Skinner opus, was expanded and revised by the Möller Company in the 1970s.

Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, located at 605 West Market Street, opened in 1969 and featured a new pipe organ that was installed in 2008.  The organ was built and donated to the church by a master craftsman who asked to remain anonymous.

Becky Sweet of Leesburg Presbyterian Church and Steven Cooksey of St. James’ Episcopal Church performed on their church organs.  Larry Correll and Aaron Shows played the organs at Leesburg United Methodist Church and Holy Trinity Lutheran Church.  Correll is the Dean of the Winchester Chapter of the American Guild of Organists (WAGO) and organist at First Baptist Church in Winchester. Shows, a recent graduate of Shenandoah University, is Director of Music at Bethel Lutheran Church in Winchester.

The organists performed classical selections by such composers as Bach, Buxtehude and Tartini. They also played hymns that were familiar to many of the participants, who stood and sang along.

The other church on the crawl, Saint John the Apostle Roman Catholic Church, does not currently have an organ.  Lauri Hofstrom, Director of Music, told the audience that the church hopes to acquire an organ that was formerly used by Falls Church Presbyterian Church.

As participants gathered in the 135-year-old French Renaissance-style chapel on North King Street, Hofstrom displayed artists’ renderings of the new church building that is currently under construction and described plans for the new organ.  She said that she hopes that the organ can be acquired and installed by the time the new church building is dedicated.

The Leesburg organ crawl was organized by WAGO and the host churches.

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