The organ in St. Francis Auditorium was donated to the museum in 1936 by James and Ruth McNary. They were music lovers who met in Las Vegas, New Mexico, when James moved there in 1898 to teach at what is now Highlands University. Ruth had studied piano, pipe organ, and violin for seven years at the New England Conservatory of Music; James went on to have a career that Horatio Alger might have envied, while still singing and directing choirs as time allowed.

In 1902, McNary bought the Las Vegas Daily Optic, and ran it for four years. The McNarys then moved to El Paso, Texas, where James worked for the First National Bank, becoming its president in 1916. In the same year, the McNarys built a new home that had a music room fitted out for a large pipe organ.

McNary soon branched out into timber investments, establishing a lumber mill in Louisiana and naming its company town after himself. The town of McNary, Louisiana, grew to have more than 3,000 residents and sported a church, school, post office, hospital, swimming pool, and a large theater.

By 1923, the company was running out of trees to cut, so McNary opted for a novel solution. He bought a bankrupt sawmill in north-central Arizona and then moved his Louisiana sawmill’s equipment and almost 800 employees and their family members west to the newly renamed town of McNary, Arizona. He and his family moved there permanently in 1928, selling their El Paso home but putting their 10-ton organ into storage until a new home could be found for it.

At the time, McNary was a board member at Edgar Lee Hewett’s School of American Research, and the McNarys began discussing moving the organ to Santa Fe in 1935. At first, McNary proposed selling it, but then he decided to donate it outright in 1936. The dedication recital in its new home took place on April 25, 1937. — M.T.