Rick Vander Woude

Highwood Lutheran Church lays claim to having the oldest pipe organ in Alberta. The organ was completed in 1870 by the O’Dell Organ Company of New York. It was built for a Presbyterian church in Sing-Sing, New York. It was obtained by Highwood from a Baptist church in Ossining, NY in 1967.

Highwood Lutheran’s organ is a mechanical, tracker-action instrument. The organ has two manuals and a pedalboard. The manuals each have fifty-eight keys and the pedal has twenty-five keys. There are twenty-three ranks, four couplers, eight combination pistons and approximately four thousand individual pipes ranging in size from a few inches long to sixteen feet long. It has three divisions, or sections; the Great Division, the Swell Division and the Pedal Division.