The original Grand Avenue Temple Methodist Church opened at Ninth and Grand in Kansas City in 1870. This was a Victorian Gothic brick church with an imposing spire, and it had a two-manual-and-pedal Marshall Brothers tracker organ. The congregation had outgrown this church by the early twentieth century, so in 1910–1912 a new and much larger neo-classical church of poured concrete with brick facing was constructed on the same site. A contract for the 44-rank, four-manual-and-pedal organ was signed with the Ernest M.
