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Moses Ogden (1844-1919) was an American folk artist known for carving figures out of root and burl wood forms. He carved the figures into fanciful groups, displaying them in his home and garden in what he called “Mose Ogden’s Wonderland”.

Life
The youngest of six children, Ogden was born to Samuel and Deborah Ann Ogden. Early in life he apprenticed as a wagon maker until Civil War muster rolls show that he joined the 19th New York Cavalry Regiment on August 9th, 1862 when he was eighteen years old. Injured in the Battle of Cold Harbor, oral history purports that he may have also been incarcerated and lived through the horrors of the Andersonville Prison.

After the war, he married Mary Elizabeth Buckley, had a daughter and built a small cabin for the family in Angelica, New York. For the next 25 years, Ogden served as a wagon maker, first for the William Seiver Carriage and Wagon Shop, and then in his own shop. Sometime in the 1890’s, freed from his day job and surviving as a Civil War pensioner, Ogden spent his days in the surrounding forests bringing back pieces of wood that spoke to him as an artist. His cabin and yard became populated with these strange figures and before long, it was well known locally as “Mose Ogden’s Wonderland”.

Two years before his death, in September, 1917, Popular Science magazine did a small article on Ogden’s “curio shop” and described that “Where the ordinary person sees only a knot of wood Mr. Ogden sees a queer-looking dog with an owl’s head, or a gnome true to story-book description, or something else uncanny.”

After his death, the carvings were collected in the 1930’s and 1940’s by Clarence Bill, a local antique dealer, but were discarded by his heir. They were again rescued from a curbside and were eventually rediscovered as the work of Ogden.

Works
Early photographs show the artist sitting on a burl root chair among a menagerie of wooden creatures. Mask-like appendages can be seen attached to works or standing alone. These pieces would end up covering his house, with strange figures on the roofline and columns.

Additional photos, seemingly taken at the same time, show a number of sculptural groupings with carefully painted title cards. Titles include “Weird and Grotesque Natural Root Forms”, “Mélange of Gargoyles and Metamorphoses in Natural Wood” and “The Inferno”.

“Mélange of Gargoyles and Metamorphoses in Natural Wood” featured a wall and table full of over forty grotesque figures and faces. A few of the pieces from this installation are extant, although the majority have yet to be rediscovered. In “The Inferno”, a central figure of a woman anchors the scene, her torso being made from a single piece of wood with the natural protrusions of the log serving as arms and sagging breasts.

A more utilitarian work would end up consuming the artist for three years. The “Ogden Chair” was a latticework hulk standing 8 feet high, 4 feet wide and weighing 350 pounds. On April 7th, 1901, The Buffalo Morning News posted the following about the chair:

"The chair illustrated on this page is the sole handiwork of Moses F. Ogden of Angelica, this State, who was three years making it. It is made of natural crooks and knots of 34 different varieties of wood, having the handsomest grain possible to find; some of roots, branches and bodies of large and small trees, the principal parts being pine, tag alder, sumac, hemlock, apple, etc. There are, in the whole chair, nearly 1,200 pieces, and in the seat alone there are 479 pieces….

…The inlaid work of the front and bottom of the seat is a marvel. A peculiarity of the chair is the fact that where one piece is found on one side, on the opposite side is one of exactly the same shape and grain. Another peculiarity is the fact that not one piece in the back is shaped by human hands but is as nature shaped it. The large piece crossing shoulder high in the back is as perfect a crook as could be made by machinery.

Mr. Ogden, who is somewhat modest, has been urged to exhibit his wonderful chairs at the Pan-American, and may do so. He has been offered, by a New York party, $1,200 for the large chair, but refuses to part with it."