When built, the Hibbing High School auditorium, where a young Robert Zimmerman performed two brief concerts in the 1950's with his first two bands, boasted a Barton pipe organ, one of only two in the United States, purchased from the Chicago Vaudeville Theater in 1920 at a cost of $26,000. Until 1928 when a student was injured in a fall and the mechanism thereafter disabled, the organ manual rose on a cylinder piston to bring the organist to stage height. With three manuals arranged in a horseshoe shape, the original Barton was known as a 12-rank organ that produced sound through 1,900 pipes hidden in closets above the two box seats. The current organ, rebuilt in Milwaukee and converted after reconstruction in Hibbing to a concert organ in 1976 by Norbert Berschdorf, now uses 1,949 pipes varying in size from one inch to sixteen feet in height to give the organ a 29-rank range. With over 100,000 working parts, the organ can reproduce sounds as varied as bird whistles, tom-toms, xylophones, and tambourines -- essentially any musical instrument except the violin -- with the sound projected from behind the diamond shaped panels above the side boxes.*
*Information about the organ courtesy Nelson French, 1970 graduate of Hibbing High.
Ed, thanks so much for posting this nice piece. You may want to remove the following unrelated remnant from a previous post: *The aerial lift bridge in Duluth is similar in that it is one of two such lift bridges in the world, the other being in Lisbon, Portugal.
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