Ossian Dodge

Ossian Euclid Dodge (October 22nd 1820 - October 17th 1876) was an American singer, composer, and performer active during the middle of the 19th century.

Early life and career Dodge's father was a mathematician who gained a national reputation brokering English claims to Canada. Dodge showed musical talent at an early age, which displeased his parents. In an attempt to curb his musical interests, they apprenticed him to a cabinetmaker at the age of 13. He became known as an ornamental painter, bronzer, gilder, and manufacturer of perspective landscape window curtains. His proficiency in making wax flower bouquets led him to female seminaries, where he taught the art. He also associated with political figures including Millard Fillmore and Henry Clay. While in Europe, he served as the foreign correspondent for his own journal The Boston Weekly Museum. He also served as the secretary of the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce from 1869 to 1873. Historian Phillip D. Jordan writes about Dodge: "Ossian Euclid Dodge arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the early 1860s when he was of middle age and had reached a time when life held little more for him than financial distress, personal humiliation, and self-imposed exile... No doubt he greeted the city of St. Paul with his customary jaunty brashness, a disguise that lent him a gay and carefree aspect but hid a skein of frustrations and twisted feelings of inferiority... All in all, Dodge looked like a seedy artist struggling to convey an air of affluent respectability; and that, indeed, is what he was. He was also jealous, quick-tempered, unstable, quarrelsome, and inordinately ambitious." Dodge is also reputed to have stolen an original photo of poet Edgar Allan Poe. The picture hung in a photographer's studio in Boston but soon vanished, and a daguerreotype of the image reappeared in Dodge's store in Cleveland.

Death Dodge died in London in 1876 and was buried there.