1845-01-01
1845-12-31
Odd Fellows, was a private club, the Grand Order of the Independent Lodge of Odd Fellows of the District of Columbia, incorporated by the Thirty-Sixth Congress. Odd Fellows Hall was constructed in 1845. According to the original plan, it was to be a three-story edifice with a front of sixty-five wide and a depth of eighty feet. The salon was forty-two feet by seventy-seven feet and twenty-two feet high. During the war, it featured plays, burlesques, comedy routines, circus acts, melodrama, and minstrel shows. Beginning in spring 1863, it featured large-scale war spectacle projections, known as "dioramas" or "great stereoscopic panoramas." The stereopticon, or magic lantern, was an optical projection instrument. According to a 12 May 1863 advertisement in the Intelligencer, Sanderson's Diorama of the Russian War, which ran for five weeks, displayed scenes on a canvas 400 feet square.
