A farmer's organ habit that filled a whole high school

Lee Conklin farmed near Hanover and had a thing for reed organs — the old foot-pumped parlor instruments that sat in nearly every nineteenth-century farmhouse before pianos and then radios pushed them out. Most people might end up with one in the corner. Conklin ended up with seventy-three. When he handed that collection over, it became the seed of something genuinely odd and wonderful.

The organs needed a home big enough to hold them, and the village had one going spare: the old Hanover High School, a solid early-twentieth-century brick schoolhouse that had outlived its students. So the reed organs moved into the classrooms. Today the collection has grown past a hundred instruments — pump organs and melodeons, plain farmhouse models and ornate Victorian ones bristling with mirrors and carved shelves, many of them mid-1800s and most of them still able to wheeze out a hymn if you work the pedals.

The whole thing runs on the Hanover-Horton Area Historical Society, formed back in the 1970s for exactly this purpose: to look after Conklin’s organs and the rest of the local past. Walking the halls, you get two museums at once — a deep, slightly eccentric survey of an instrument that once defined how ordinary families made music at home, set inside a school building that’s a piece of local history in its own right.

It’s a small-town museum in the best sense. One man’s quiet obsession, a building nobody else wanted, and a handful of volunteers who decided that more than a hundred old organs were worth keeping in tune. Pull up a pedal and one of them will likely still sing.