St. John Lutheran Church, Bingen, was organized on December 26, 1845, when those members of Zion, Friedheim, who lived east of the St. Mary's River resolved to form a new congregation. The congregation moved to its current location in 1851 and constructed its current house of worship in 1878. In March 1903, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the building's construction, the congregation resolved to purchase a new $2,000 organ, with the installation to occur later that summer. As it happened, the organ ended up costing $2,200 and was not installed until the following May. A contemporary newspaper account describes it as a two-manual tubular pneumatic organ with seventeen speaking stops and 1,091 pipes, contained within a case that is 13½ feet wide, 10 feet deep, and 19 feet high.

The organ was electrified in 1938 and first releathered in 1973. Peebles-Herzog provided all new keydesk components along with a MIDI and a solid state combination action in 1998. The windchest is possibly the last surviving example of a design patented by Philipp Wirsching in 1896.

Sources: [Decatur] Daily Democrat, March 3, 1903, p. 3, col. 3.

Decatur Democrat, March 12, 1903, p. 1, col. 1.

[Decatur] Daily Democrat, May 2, 1904, p. 1, col. 1.

[Decatur] Daily Democrat, May 5, 1904, p. 1, col. 5.

Thomas Wood, "The History and Development of Pneumatic Windchests: Part Two," Journal of American Organbuilding 33, no. 3 (August 2018): 14–16.