St. Martin of
Tours Church

Switching from the secular to the sacred and from the city to the rolling hills of rural farmlands just south of Cleveland, Monday morning, July 6, we travel a short distance to Saint Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Valley City. Looking like a Hallmark note card, this picture-perfect red brick and white-trimmed Gothic Revival parish church was designed by noted church architect Patrick C. Keely and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The interior retains its prickly Gothic altars and liturgical furnishings reputed to have been carved in Germany. A perfect match to this 1861 building is the exceedingly rare two-manual 1881 Odenbrett & Abler organ, the work of a builder in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, known to have used a variety of actions including tracker, pneumatic, and membrane chests. With the exception of the pedal action, changed long ago by the late Homer Blanchard to keep it playable, this organ survives largely as a result of the use of traditional tracker action for the manual divisions. Believed to be the last extent instrument by this organbuilder, the instrument is housed in a carved butternut Gothic case with a polished tin façade. As if the use of decorative polished tin pipes in an organ case were not rare enough for a late 19th-century builder, the inclusion of an original Pedal to Great coupler surely is! Organist Andrew Scanlon will demonstrate this organ’s warm German Romantic voices.