Gabriel Miesse › Tunes

Gabriel Ralph Miesse was born Jan. 5th, 1838 in Dumontville, Fairfield County, Ohio, descended from a German-American family from Berks County, Pennsylvania. His father, Gabriel Lafayette Miesse, was a doctor who was also known as an artist, engraver, and inventor. The younger Gabriel followed his father into the medical field, first serving as his assistant and eventually earning a medical diploma from the Cincinnati Eclectic Institute in 1856.

He established a practice in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1864, and lived there the remainder of his life. A polymath like his father, Miesse was an artist and occasional architect, and carried on a lifelong avocation in music. He began teaching music classes in his early teens, and published about two dozen compositions, chiefly for piano. His most ambitious work was a comic opera in German-American dialect, Schermania in America, with a libretto by his cousin Charles Miesse, copyrighted in 1892.

Miesse contributed several tunes to The Evergreen (Cleveland, 1873), an early Sunday School collection edited by Elisha Hoffman for the Evangelical Association churches. His second cousin, Cornelius T. Dondore, similarly provided a number of musical settings. When the Evangelical Association established a congregation in Lancaster, Ohio, Miesse allowed them the use of a lot for a revival meeting at which he himself was eventually converted. He passed away in Columbus, September 11th, 1911.

Sources:
Abbott, Carol A. A 21st Century Investigation of the Historical, Musical and Acoustical Contexts of a 19th Century Comic Opera, Schermania in America, Composed by Dr. Gabriel Miesse, Jr. Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1303937248

Graham, A. A. A History of Fairfield and Perry Counties, Ohio: Their Past and Present. Chicago: W. H. Beers, 1883. https://archive.org/details/historyoffairfie00grah/

FamilySearch, "The Family Tree," database, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org : accessed 21 March 2025), Gabriel Ralph Miesse (LS68-SMH), Details.

--David Russell Hamrick