When Darren Hoyland sits at the Casavant pipe organ at First Presbyterian Church on Wednesday, he will be continuing a tradition started in 1943.
The church is inviting the public for lunch and an organ recital at noon Wednesday to honor Carrie Lutcher Brown and National Music Week.
Mrs. Brown was one of the 1878 founding members of First Presbyterian Church when she was 17 and her name was Carrie Launa Lutcher. Her mother, Frances Ann Lutcher, built the granite church building on Green Avenue that opened in 1912.
After Mrs. Brown’s death in 1941, her two sons honored her by establishing the Carrie Lutcher Brown Foundation to help support the church’s upkeep and maintenance.
A 1978 history of First Presbyterian Church Orange, published as part of the congregation’s 100th anniversary, said the terms of the foundation included honoring Mrs. Brown every year during National Music Week.
National Music Week is the week after the first Sunday in May. The church has special music and flowers each year during the week for Mrs. Brown, who loved music.
The foundation was officially formed in 1942 and the first National Music Week for Mrs. Brown was celebrated in 1943.
Wednesday’s organ recital is part of that tradition. But it will have a bit of the 21st Century. Hoyland’s program will be “Old Hymns with a Twist.”
Cara Love, church secretary, said the music from the upstairs sanctuary to the downstairs area where people will be able to have a free lunch while listening to the music. Or people may go upstairs and sit in the sanctuary for the program.
The organ recital is a fitting tribute for the occasion. First Presbyterian Church has a custom-made Casavant Freres pipe organ donated in honor of Mrs. Brown by her sons Edgar Brown Jr. and H. Lutcher Brown.
The church history says the organ was commissioned as part of the congregation’s 75th anniversary and replaced the Hope-Jones organ that was originally in the 1912 church building. The Casavant organ was first played at a church service on Easter 1953. It was valued at $50,000 at the time, or about $480,000 today on the U.S. inflation scale.
The church completed an organ restoration project in time for the instrument to be played at the church building’s 100th anniversary in 2012.
Mrs. Brown was one of two daughters of Henry Jacob and Frances Ann Lutcher. Her older sister was Miriam Lutcher Stark.
The Lutcher family moved to Orange in 1877 as her father and his business partner established the Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company. Carrie was 16 years old at the time.
The next year, Carrie and her sister, Miriam, were listed among the nine people, four men and five women, who signed the papers to establish First Presbyterian Church on April 6, 1878.
The first church building was a white, wood-frame structure with a bell tower. It was near the Sabine River at the corner of Polk and Market streets.
Mrs. Brown was with her mother and sister when they visited the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There they saw prize-winning stained-glass windows by Lamb Studios in New York. Mrs. Lutcher bought the windows and then hired Lamb to help design a new building for First Presbyterian Church.
The church, known as the Lutcher Memorial, was dedicated in January 1912.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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