The Courier
Volume 24, No. 2 (2000)
Ernest M.
Skinner
by Stanley Russell Howe
Ernest Martin Skinner
1866-1960
In Bethel’s Woodland Cemetery, not far from the Gothic
Revival tomb, is the grave of Ernest M. Skinner, one of America’s
leading
organ makers whose fame spread across the Atlantic. Skinner
married a Bethel woman, Mabel Hastings, in 1893 at the Hastings family
homestead on Broad Street, and lies near the Hastings family lot with
her.
Ernest Martin Skinner was born in Clarion, PA, the son of touring
concert singers Washington and Alice Skinner. Washington Martin
Skinner
was born in 1836 in Lowell, MA, and his wife Alice Frances Brett was
born in 1844 in Houlton, ME. They were married in Marlboro, MA,
in 1864;
Ernest appeared in 1866 as their first child. Another son , Harry
Clifford Skinner, was born two years later in Craftsbury, VT, where his
parents were apparently on another concert tour.
From an early age, Ernest Skinner showed a strong interest in the
production
of sounds. In fact he tried to make music from almost anything his
hands touched. When he was seven, his parents
gave up their nomadic musical life and settled down in Taunton, MA,
presumably so the two sons could obtain their schooling. It was
Ernest’s father who fostered his interest in music through the music
company he organized in Taunton. Here he attended rehearsals and
performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, which stimulated his
consuming interest in music and became the motivating force for his
creative spirit.
When Ernest was a teenager, the family moved to West Somerville, MA,
where he attended high school for approximately six months. In
his Autobiography,
he stated that the reason for leaving his schooling was his inability
to
understand Latin, but Dorothy Holden in her biography, The Life and Work of Ernest M. Skinner,
attributes it to the fact that the family fortunes declined
precipitously and Ernest was obliged to assist in supporting the
family. It was during this time that Ernest saw his first pipe
organ and later got a job as a bellows pumper at fifteen cents per
hour. He also repaired his first organ at this early stage of
life.
Frustrated by his lack of finding a niche during these years, Ernest
became a “shop boy” for George H. Ryder, a small organ builder located
in Reading, MA. It was here that Ernest’s
interest in
organs began to be take shape. After four years here, Ernest was
summarily fired one morning. This departure proved fortuitous for
it soon meant that he would work for Jesse Woodbury of Boston briefly
and then the George S. Hutchings Organ Company from 1889 to 1901.
In
1898, he traveled abroad to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and
France to learn all he could from European organ builders.
In 1901, he decided to strike out on his own by developing his dream of
a more expressive pipe organ by exploiting all the benefits to be
gained by the “new” electro-pneumatic action. He either developed
or
greatly refined entirely new families of stops for the pipe
organ. Skinner’s strengths were not as a businessman, but as a
creator of rich organ sounds. He frequently spent more on his
organs
than he charged for them and occasionally delivered them behind
schedule. His immaculate workmanship, clever innovations, and
magnificent tone, however, consistently attracted more customers.
His fortunes took a turn for the better in 1919 when the millionaire
chemist and organ aficionado Arthur Hudson Marks (1874-1939) bought
the controlling interest in the company, and reorganized, streamlined,
and
capitalized the entity as the Skinner Organ Company. Skinner made
a trip in the 1920s to the factory of Henry
Willis III in England to study new ideas in the tonal designs of
organs. When he returned home, he incorporated many of these
ideas into
his organ building.
In 1927, G. Donald Harrison, an outstanding employee of Henry Willis’,
was hired by Marks to help Skinner improve the tonal design of his
organ. Skinner welcomed the younger man into his company, but the
good relations did not endure. In 1930, tensions between the two
men were rife. The stock market crash the previous year did
little for the company fortunes as well; sales fell from $1.4 million
in 1928 to only $604,000 in 1931.
Skinner sold his stock in the company in 1930 and planned to start a
rival organ building firm. Fearing the potential negative effect
of
such a move, Marks and his board offered Skinner $5,000 per year for
five years to do little except keep his association with the
Company. When the agreement ended, Skinner left the company to
found his own with his son Richmond.
The new firm built a large organ for the National Cathedral in
Washington, DC, in 1937 as well as several other new and many rebuilt
instruments. By 1949, Ernest completely retired from the
organ
business. The organ building business had completely changed and
Skinner was decidedly out of favor. Sadly, many of his
masterpieces were
replaced with more fashionable instruments that represented what was in
favor at the time. Skinner’s wife, Mabel, died in 1951. He
lived on to the age 94, dying in 1960.
Today many of Skinner's organs have been or are being painstakingly
restored
to their former Skinner glory. The Skinner organ in Severance Hall in
Cleveland just recently underwent such a
transformation. One of the most carefully maintained Skinner
organ is
at Woolsley Hall at Yale. Today he is recognized as one of the
leading
organ builders in the United States, fully living up to the epitaph on
his gravestone at Woodland Cemetery: “Great American Organ
Builder.”