To accompany previous exhibits (drowned and burned), a brief mention of the organ controversy at the First Baptist Church in Tyler, Smith County, Texas.
One of the deacons had objected so strongly to an instrument of music in the house of the Lord that an organ acquired for the church was put in the baptistry, where it remained for some time. The two sons of the deacon, both good musicians, influenced their father after their conversions to give his consent to bring the organ out of the baptistry for church use.
The incident apparently occurred in the 1850s, as the telling of the incident is placed in the story of the pastorate of J. T. Bledsoe, 1856-1859. This baptistry was not in the church house, as many today, but was in a separate building apart from the church house. “In a large yard surrounded by trees, a brick building, forty by sixty feet, containing a baptistry was erected. Since there was no public water system in the town, the baptistry was never used for its original purpose; the ever-flowing spring continued to be used.” The First One Hundred Years: Centennial Story, the First Baptist Church, Tyler, Texas.
There is a later mention of a reed organ donated in 1878 by Mssrs. Beaird and Hamilton.
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