Alaska’s Oldest Organ Plays Again After a Century

By David Dahl

After about 100 years of silence and a fire which caused its near destruction, the 1844 Estonian-built organ by Ernst Kessler for Sitka Lutheran Church is restored and playing once again. Russian Alaska in the early 1800s and the arrival of that territory’s first pipe organ in 1844 in New Archangel (now Sitka) involves a fascinating history of fur traders, Finnish and German Lutheran pioneers, native Americans, and the Russian Orthodox Church. Sitka is a picturesque historic island city in the middle of Southeast Alaska, amid mountains, fjords and forests, where the American bald eagle is a common everyday sight.

The discovery of Alaska in 1741 is credited to Vitus Bering, a Dane (and incidentally a Lutheran) in the service of the Russian Navy. Claimed as Russian territory, Alaska became a rich source of fur trading, fishing, and lumber. By 1799 Russian fur trade was organized under the Russian-American Company, a monopoly enjoying full privileges of the Russian government, its sphere of operations being a part of the Czar’s empire. Early Russian Orthodox missionaries sent from Siberia to Alaska arrived in Kodiak in 1794 and started work among the Aleut and Koniag Indians and later with the northern Eskimos and the Tlingit Indians. By 1840 there were four Russian Orthodox churches in Alaska, including churches in Kodiak, Unalaska, Atka, and the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel in New Archangel. It was not until after 1867, when Alaska was sold by Russia to the United States that the city became known as Sitka, a community make up of Russians, Aleuts, Tlingit, Creoles, Finns, and Germans.

By 1840 there were approximately 150 Lutherans in the service of the Russian-American Company, mostly Finns (including Swedish Finns) and Baltic-area Germans. These Lutherans had neither pastor nor church, nor were their spiritual needs being tended. The Russian government came to realize that it was in their best economic interest to recognize the religious rights of these peoples and to establish a Lutheran parish in Alaska. At the same time the Russians prohibit any propagation of their beliefs beyond their own domain. The governor of Russian America at this time was Admiral Arvid Adolf Etholén, a Finn who served from 1840-1845. Etholén had first come to Alaska in 1818 as a teenage sailor in the Imperial Russian Navy. Combining naval duties with his for the Russian-American Company, Etholén soon was one of Alaska’s most important 19th-century leaders throughout an extensive and distinguished career. On a visit to Helsinki in 1838 he met his wife-to-be, Margareta, a deeply religious Lutheran.

Although prior efforts to provide a pastor for the Lutheran of Sitka and surrounding area had been discouraged by the Orthodox Church and its local bishop, Innocent, official permission was ultimately granted to appoint a Lutheran pastor to Alaska, with the right to establish a congregation as a part of the Lutheran diocese of St. Petersburg (Russia). The minister was to be a Finn, and his salary was to be paid by the Russian-American Company, together with a one-percent self-imposed salary tax voted for by the congregation. Thus the appointment of Pastor Uno Cygnaeus, the first Lutheran pastor in Alaska and of all Western America, appears to have come about largely as the result of mutual concerns by Governor Etholén, his new wife Margareta, and Varon von Wrangel, director of the Russian-American Company.

Boarding the Nikolai 1, a 450-ton, 10 gun sailing ship in 1839, the Etholéns together with Pastor Cygnaeus, began their nine month voyage from Finland to Alaska around Cape Horn. During the journey Cygnaeus began serving part of his new congregation on board ship. He baptized the Etholéns newborn son, Edward, and presided at the marriage of a crew member. Shortly after the arrival of the Nikolai in New Archangel on May 12, 1840, the first Lutheran congregation in Alaska was established. From 1840 until 1843 the congregation worshipped in the Green Room of the Governor’s mansion known as “Baranof’s Castle.” Cygnaeus quickly set about the building of a new church, which was consecrated in the summer of 1843. Services were conducted in Swedish, Finnish, and German. Orthodox Bishop Innocent had been unhappy about the construction of the new edifice and insisted that it should not “look like a church” since it was on the main street near St. Michael’s Church, first built in 1826 and replaced in 1848 with a grader building known as St. Michael’s Cathedral.

Governor Etholén was the apparent donor of the five-stop, one-manual Kessler pipe organ, which was built in Tartu (Dorpat), Estonia, in 1844 by the “master of Tartu.” The organ arrived by ship from Estonia in 1845 or 1846. Margareta Etholén had apparently purchased a reed organ or perhaps a harmonium in St. Petersburg, Russia, and brought it with her along with a barrel organ, suggesting her interest in music, and in particular, organ music. Records indicate that an organ of some sort was used for worship prior to the Kessler organ – and likely one of Margareta’s instruments.

The Kessler pipe organ, probably the first pipe organ in any church on the Pacific coast north of Mexico, was initially described incorrectly in early Sitka records as a “six toned reed [sic] organ.” Six drawknobs do exist on the organ, but one stopknob is labeled “Nihil,” meaning literally nothing. (This knob had been previously misread as Zihil: Paul Schneider in the article, “An Historic Kessler Organ in our Forth-Ninth State,” (Tracker 20:2:14), states “I have been unable to find the meaning of the drawknob marked ‘Zihil,’” presuming it to be some kind of speaking stop.)

Cygnaeus served as pastor of the Lutheran congregation from 1840-1845. Both Cygnaeus and the Etholén family left Sitka May 16, 1845, to return to Finland, where they remained. Because of shipping delays, neither the alleged donor Governor Etholén, nor Pastor Cygnaeus was unfortunately able to hear the organ prior to their departure. The long-awaited new organ was placed on a small balcony in the rear of the new church, where it was used for approximately forty years. Cygnaeus’ successor was Pastor Gabriel Plathan, whose father and grandfather had been cantors in the local parish church of Saarijärvi, Finland. One might assume from this background that a respect for fine worship and music was part of Pastor Plathan’s ministry in the Sitka congregation.

The first organist to play the Kessler instrument was a Baltic-German bookkeeper, Andreas Höppner, from Tallinn, who, apparently to Pastor Cygnaeus’ dismay, could only “compose” [sic] or perform dance music. Höppner’s successor, reportedly more successful as a liturgical organist, was Aaron Sjöstrom, the Finnish manservant of Cygnaeus and the verger of the Lutheran congregation who had come to Sitka with Höppner in 1839.

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