Holtkamp Organ Co.
Opus Job No. 1712, 1958

From the NYC AGO NYC Organ Project: Chartered by the Episcopal Church in 1817, the General Theological Seminary was built with the support of Trinity Church, most notably Vestryman Jacob Sherred, and Clement Clarke Moore, best known for penning "Twas the night before Christmas." Moore offered 60 lots of his rural Chelesa estate on the condition that a seminary be built there. An East Building was the first to open in 1827, followed by a West Building erected in 1836. The Rev. Eugene Augustus Hoffman, who graduated from General in 1851, became its first dean in 1879. Hoffman endowed the chair of pastoral theology with $80,000, and on the death of his father, Samuel Yerplanek Hoffman, his mother contributed $125,000 for the building of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd as a memorial to her husband.

The Chapel of the Good Shepherd was designed by Charles Coolidge Haight in the collegiate-Gothic style, and was built between 1886-88 as the centerpiece of the seminary. Haight's father, the Rev. Benjamin I. Haight, was the first rector of St. Peter's Church, located a block away on West 20th Street. The chapel's tower contains a set of 15 tubular chimes, manufactured in 1922 by the Walter H. Durfee Company of Providence, R.I. The seminary's Guild of Chimers ring the chimes mechanically each morning and evening.

Updated through online information from Steve Lawson.

Identified through information published in John Ferguson's Walter Holtkamp: American Organ Builder (DMA treatise, Eastman School of Music, 1976). Although neither Votteler-Holtkamp-Sparling nor their successor Holtkamp Organ Co. assigned Opus numbers to their instruments, this organ was identified in factory documents as Job number 1712. That number appears here as the Opus number of this instrument.