What does history sound like?

It is more than a musical instrument. It is a link to a time when Youngstown was emerging as one of the nation’s great industrial centers. It was home to tens of thousands of men who made steel and to a smaller but equally important group of men who founded and nurtured some of the great companies of the day, who designed and built the equipment that produced steel in plants around the world and who invented revolutionary processes for making and milling steel.

This environment welcomed some of the tallest buildings between New York and Chicago, and some of the grandest mansions, too. Fine parks, public buildings, museums, theaters and, on the North Side of Youngstown, a civic auditorium and music hall equal to any in the land, Stambaugh Auditorium.

As Idora Park was home to one of the finest carousels the Philadelphia Toboggan Co. could produce, Stambaugh Auditorium housed one of the finest musical instruments of its day, the E.M. Skinner pipe organ. It has nearly 4,000 pipes; the smallest is the size of a No. 2 pencil, the largest is 30 inches by 32 feet and weighs 750 pounds.

Today, Idora Park’s carousel is turning within sight of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. But the Skinner pipe organ, sibling to others that have been preserved at the Washington National Cathedral, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Cleveland Public Auditorium and Lincoln Center, remains in Youngstown.

About $1.5 million has been spent to bring the 85-year-old organ to what is perhaps its finest sound ever. And today is its rededication concert, with David Higgs, chairman of the organ and historic instruments department at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., working the Skinner’s four manual consoles and 67 stops. Randall Craig Fleischer, music director and conductor of the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra, will conduct a program that blends orchestra and organ.

The range and tone of the organ is remarkable. It can lull you with sounds as sweet as the coo of an infant and as soft as the purr of a kitten one instant; then shake your body with the force of a sudden gale.

Tickets remain available for today’s 4 p.m. concert at the Stambaugh box office, which opens at 1 p.m.

There will be events at Stambaugh for years to come designed to take advantage of one of Youngstown’s great treasures.

The E.M. Skinner organ remains a piece of Youngstown’s past and will be part of its future