“There has been a lot of behind the scenes work that people don’t necessarily know about, moving exhibits in and out of storage.” “It’s been a long haul for the staff,” said Melanie Alexander, director of the Muscatine Art Center. The mansion has been closed since February 2016 while it underwent remodeling. The Musser Mansion was gifted to the city in 1965 to become an art gallery and museum for Muscatine. Atkins.ĭespite the move, she maintained ownership of the home, and would stop in whenever she was in Muscatine until her death in 1964 at the age of 87. Musser remarried in 1938 and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, with second husband, William T. Inspired by Musser’s love for music, a music room and Estey organ, built by Estey Organ Company of Battleboro, Vermont, was added to the mansion in 1921. She was known to perform for parties and other gatherings and on local radio in Muscatine. The mansion was built as a wedding gift from Laura’s father, Peter Musser, a lumber baron.Īs a singer, pianist and organist, Laura Musser studied music at Grant Seminary in Chicago and under Giovanni Sbriglia, an Italian opera singer in Paris, France. One such job is at the Muscatine Art Center, the former mansion of Laura Musser and husband Edwin McColm. “A sizeable organ takes a couple three or four days to take it apart then you have to move it to where its new place is, and then you also have to redesign it, usually, to fit in a new place - and we do that,” Levsen said. And even sales of used organs between churches create a role for Levsen to play. With churches closing doors because of low attendance, an abundance of used organs depressed the market for new organ orders that made the Levsen business thrive in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Quad-City Times ( ) reported.īusiness has changed, but it has not gone away. “We’ve taken a beating because of the economic thing, and churches are having their problems,” Levsen said. The market for church organs certainly isn’t what it once was for the company. “We have 215 churches that we tune and service for - they’re all over the country,” Levsen said. Levsen spends much of his time in the office now, but the other two generations go where the work is. So, two of my sons work in our business and my grandson Chris is in the business now, and who knows where it goes from there.” “One of the things that I’ve always sort of had in the back of my mind - I wanted to be able to create a service business that would help other people and churches,” Levsen said, “to have a reliable, well known business that I could leave for my family. And he began building his own Levsen-brand organs. His mechanical interest and fascination with electronics lead him to do well with the work and “college never came.”Īfter a decade as a sales and service representative for the Highland, Illinois-based Wick’s Organ Company, Levsen branched out, building the company’s plant in Buffalo, Iowa, in 1980. Years of studying piano as a boy combined with his experiences at the church found Levsen tuning pianos to save money for college after he graduated from high school.