NATCHEZ — Few people would mistake Burnley Cook’s garage for one of Natchez’s old movie houses.

But when visitors close their eyes and hear Cook play the organ that fills more than half of his garage workshop on Winchester Road, they might for a second believe they are standing inside the Baker Grand Theater in the 1920s.

For three and a half years, Cook has been carefully piecing together the pipe organ that was removed from the theater on Pearl Street when it closed in the 1970s.

The organ sat in storage for more than four decades until Cook saw a post on Facebook from Ruth Powers, the daughter of Bob Shumway who salvaged the organ before the theater was demolished.

Cook had heard rumors that the old organ existed, but said he did not believe the rumors until Powers wrote that she had it and was ready to take it to the trash, unless someone else wanted it.

“I thought, ‘No, indeed. We can’t trash that.’” Cook said. “I remember seeing the organ when we went to see the movies as kids. The organ was one of the remaining relics from the Baker Grand.”

Putting together the pieces to the organ has been a three-and-a-half year journey for Cook who knew very little about organs when his work began.

“I have been working almost daily (for the last 10 months),” Cook said. “If I wasn’t not out on a job or in the church, I was (in the garage) getting the organ finished.”

“I just couldn’t go on for another year or year-and-a-half with this.”

The organ, built by the Robert Morton Company in 1922, was installed in the Baker Grand for $10,000. The instrument was used to accompany silent movies until the late 1920s when “talkies” relegated the organ to being used during intermissions and the occasional sing-along concert Cook said. In the mid-1950s, the organ stopped working after the motor to the blower seized because it was not oiled regularly.

Six decades later, Cook has had the motor repaired and restored the organ to its 1922 condition.

Not all of the pieces, though, are original, Cook said.

“Eighty-five percent of the organ is what Shumway kept in storage,” he said.

Missing from the original organ was a set of pipes.

“Back in the day when you didn’t worry about anything, people dropped their kids off at the Baker Grand on Saturday to watch movies,” Cook said. “The theater didn’t lock the door to the pipe chambers (after the organ stopped working) and kids would take the pipes off and sword fight with them or take them home as whistles.

“The pipework either got completely destroyed or taken away.”

Not wanting to use shiny, brand new pipes that would detract from the original pipes, Cook found a set of old pipes from a similar organ built by the Robert Morton Company and purchased them for his organ.

The only piece of the organ Cook hasn’t built is the chamber for the pipes, including the set of original louvers that are used to adjust the organ’s volume. Cook said he wants to see if he can find a place to move the instrument before building the walls for the chamber.

Cook also replaced the organ’s old relay system that connected the keyboard to the pipes with a newer digital system that will allow him to easily expand the organ, if he wanted.

“The relay system was like an old telephone switchboard that connected the keys to the pipes,” Cook said. “There was a separate wire for each pipe or anything else that moved or made noise.”

The Baker Grand organ was considered a small theater organ and did not include a lot of sound effects — such as gun shots, horse clopping and bird whistles — found in larger theaters, Cook said.

Even still, the Baker Grand organ does have a xylophone, harp, chimes, including a full set of pipes that can create effects that resembled everything from violins to sounds that approximate the human voice.

With a great deal of research and much help from other organ experts in the state, Cook finished most of the organ and unveiled it with an online concert in November.  Through Christmas, Cook is posting daily Facebook videos of Christmas songs played from his workshop.

Cook hopes to soon find a new home that is more suitable for the organ than a two-car garage.

“As much as I love walking out here and playing it, this is not the right place for it,” Cook said. “You can’t fully appreciate the organ unless you have a big enough room to get that full sound.”

Cook said he wishes someone would spend the money to move the organ after renovating either the Ritz Theater on Commerce Street or the Clark Theater on Main Street.

“Even the old Margaret Martin School would be an ideal place,” Cook said. “You would just have to find a place put it.”

Until then, Cook said he would continue working on the organ to keep it maintained.

“I will do my best to keep it up,” Cook said. “I will keep fiddling with it and playing it.”