Workers spent a week gathering the pieces of the organ and loading them in a truck. Then, just before dawn Monday, they left Ohio.
When they arrived at the Severna Park church Monday, they found a crowd of about two dozen parishioners waiting in front of the church, many clicking photographs to document the moment.
Lillian La Porte, 80, who sings with the choir, embraced friends as the truck pulled in. Then her eyes grew wide as workers lifted the door of the trailer, exposing hundreds of wooden chests, pieces of scaffolding and pipes wrapped in blankets.
"I think that's going to fill the entire sanctuary and we're not going to have any room for chairs," she said, laughing.
Church members ferried one mysterious object after another off the truck and into the building - rattling plastic suitcases, rectangular wooden pipes as thick as fire hydrants, thick corrugated tubes.
One member, Harold "Doc" Bohlman, looked rather like a moving photograph as he carried what appeared to be a giant photo frame into the church. Others carried an elaborate pulley, wrenches longer than their arms and countless strangely shaped pieces of metal.
"It's a Dr. Seuss organ," joked Lori Skalitsky of Crofton.
Today, workers will continue to assemble the roughly 20-foot-tall organ, as they will for the next two weeks. It will rise up a wall that has a small door midway between the floor and ceiling - for working on the organ - that, according to church lore, one second-grader at the church's parochial school thought was a door to heaven.
Workers will let the organ settle and adjust to the climate for a week before they tune it.
"The organ won't be ready to work on until it gets used to its new place," said Betty, of the organ company.
The congregation has several organ concerts planned for the coming months, said Adam Koch, the church's music director and organ master, but the sounds will be most enjoyed during Sunday services.
Koch said, "I think it will really inspire the congregation to sing."
julie.scharper@baltsun.com
