Thomas Johnston

Thomas Johnston (1708–1767) was an American engraver, japanner, and heraldic painter in Colonial Boston. Johnston engraved the first print of an historical event in the Colonial America and was also the first manufacturer of church organs in the colonies. The pipe organ he built in 1758–1759 for Boston's Old North Church was in use for over a hundred years until another organ replaced it in 1886. Pipe organ manufacturing Johnston's workshop was in his home's backyard. While he advertised his businesses as being organ making, engraving, and furniture merchant, he also worked as a japanner, painted coats of arms, and published books. He was an engraver of skill and a heraldic painter whose works included views of Boston. His furniture skills included japanning, a technique of rendering "elaborate applied decorations" onto furniture. Though at least one other person had created a singular organ in the colonies before him, Johnston is considered to have been the first Bostonian to build an organ and had the earliest church organ manufacturing business in Colonial America. Boston's Old North Church's first organ was one imported by William Claggett in 1736. In 1752, the church decided to buy a replacement organ from Johnston that they wanted to be as loud as the Boston Trinity Church organ. Johnston finishing constructing the organ in 1759. This Johnston pipe organ was in regular use until the 1820s. The present casing is the completely-restored case from the Johnston instrument. The organ's inner workings – the pipes, pedals, bellows and so on (though of Johnston's type) – are completely new and date to the complete renovation/restoration that was started in 1992. In 1754, Johnston built an organ for St. Peter's in Salem, Massachusetts. Johnston is also known to have built organs for Boston's Deblois Concert Hall and for St. John's Church (in Portsmouth, New Hampshire). Some of his organs originally installed in a first church or venue were then later re-used secondhand in other churches.