When St. Paul’s church was near completion in 1905, the pipe organ from the Baldwin Street church was removed and re-installed in the new sanctuary. Despite repairs and cosmetic adjustments, the old organ could not satisfy the music or acoustic requirements of the new Sanctuary. Within six years it was removed and replaced by a new, larger and tonally diverse organ. For the sake of economy, some of the old organs pipes were retained and shipped to the organ builder for repairs and adaptation to the new organ.
The “new organ” is a 1911, Casavant Freres, 2 manual, 19 rank instrument composed of 1057 pipes. The artistic influence of the voicing and stop specification is convincingly “French-Romantic”. When the instrument was designed, Casavant produced organs in three mechanism formats. St. Paul’s chose “Tubular-Pneumatic” action for their new organ but the reasons for this choice are unknown; “Electric-Pneumatic” action had been successfully employed by Casavant for over two decades and provided significant advantages not inherent to Tubular-Pneumatic action. The organs one reservoir was designed and equipped to be fed forced air from either an electric blower or hand-pumped bellows, this allowed the organ to work in the presence or absence of electricity. In light of the decisions made concerning the mechanical aspects of the organ, one may justifiably wonder if the leaders of St. Paul’s questioned the perpetual feasibility of electric power. By 1931, the demand for tubular-pneumatic pipe organs had dwindled and virtually all organ builders terminated production of them.
Currently, the 1911 Casavant organ in St. Pauls’ is one of only a few remaining, pristine and operating tubular pneumatic pipe organs in Canada. In 2011, it was officially recognized as a “Category A,” historic pipe organ by the Historic Organ Committee of the Royal Canadian College of Organists.
