From Wayne Johnson March 1, 2026: Originally built by Hook & Hastings in 1884 as their Opus #1231 the organ was of 3 manuals, 39 stops containing 30 ranks. It was said to be the first organ of 3 manuals installed in Lowell, MA.
In 1929, William Laws electrified the organ and added a new 4 manual Austin console including a prepared-for "Echo" Division in the rear gallery. The Echo utilized mostly Hutchings pipework from a church in Fitchburg, MA. Local organ builder Rostron Kershaw performed many repairs to the organ in the 1940s, mostly after water damage from a leaking roof. As the organ reform movement started to gain traction, another local organ builder Wilson Barry, added "neo-baroque" style ranks throughout the Great and Swell (as indicated by the brighter white stoptabs). Finally, in 2021, Scot Huntington rebuilt and added some pipework to the Echo division making it more of an Antiphonal organ.

When Laws electrified the Hook & Hastings, he added an Echo made of parts of the former Hutchings Swell division originally installed at Christ Church, Fitchburg. He recycled one of the two Swell chests in Lowell, and 8 of the 10 Echo ranks were repurposed from the same Hutchings. When the Skinner Organ Co. replaced the Hutchings, Laws took some or all of the Hutchings for parts. The SLH & Co. work rebuilt the Echo as an Antiphonal, replacing the non-Hutchings string pair with Diapason chorus elements, but all the extant Hutchings ranks were retained and restored. The windchest is a side-bar pitman chest as developed by Skinner when he was employed by Hutchings, and was releathered.

The 2021 work included a new German blower in the gallery and a new, more substantial chamber construction for the gallery division. A unit borrow action was added to the bass of the Stopped Diapason for the addition of an Antiphonal Pedal Bourdon 16', with new pipes and chest for notes 1-12. The Laws Chimes were not reinstalled so its stop tab could be used for another stop, but the Chimes are stored at the church. The Laws console was either built by Austin or was one of Laws rather good Austin knock-offs. The Austin company provided replacement stop tabs for the Antiphonal stoprail.

No work was done on the Hook & Hastings at this time, other than the emergency repair of several failing pneumatic stop action motors. The minor tonal revisions of the H&H by Wilson Barry at the instigation of music director John Ogasapian, were still in place at that time. More recently, the Andover Organ Company has performed restorative repairs to the Laws pneumatic action components controlling the H&H.

Identified through online information from Scott Crowell. -- Addition of Antiphonal organ to existing Hook & Hastings organ that had previously been electrified by Laws in 1929. Information from The American Organist, May 2001, page 67.