Consul Sovelius, or more officially Fredrik Oskar Sovelius, has been somewhat overshadowed by a variety of merchants and shipowners called Sovelius. This lack of recognition is partly due to the fact that he died of a heart attack at the young age of only 41. He suffered from lung disease.  Fredrik Oskar was to succeed his father, the famous commercial counsellor Fredrik Sovelius, as the head of the Trade House of Lang. By the time he took the company over in the early 1890s, our town’s commercial seafaring with international trade connections was already coming to an end. This was not just the fault of the Raahe people. The Saimaa Canal, larger sailing ships with iron hulls, steamboats and railways, among other things, had an adverse effect on our business.

Fredrik Oskar Sovelius was born as the third child of merchant, shipowner Fredrik Sovelius and his wife Johanna Franzén at Salahmi in June 1855. Salahmi Ironwoks was one of the many businesses of Zachris Franzén which, after Franzén’s death, were transferred to Fredrik Sovelius. Fredrik Oskar presumably spent his childhood as a son of a very typical wealthy bourgeois family. Of course, the death of mother Johanna, familiarly called Jenny, as early as 1857 for complications after the birth of her fourth child must have been a great sorrow. Of Jenny’s and Fredrik’s children, only Fredrik Oskar and Georg, a couple of years younger, lived to adulthood; the two older siblings passed away as small children. Commercial counsellor Fredrik Sovelius remarried in 1891 to Ebba Katinka Ljunggren, who was much younger than him.

Fredrik Oskar was called Oskar. The bark Oskar & Georg, built in 1861, was named after the brothers. What is known about Oskar’s schooling is that, after going to school in Raahe, he studied at the Oulu Trivial School at the turn of the 1860s and 1870s. It can be assumed that he spent years of ‘on-the-job training’ in the trade houses owned by his father and uncles in order to take over the multidisciplinary and successful Trade House of Lang. Getting to know foreign trade houses was certainly part of his studies, as it had been with so many other Raahe boys who wanted to become merchants. It could also be imagined that Oskar was also being prepared for the reformer’s mantle because, after all, merchant shipping was fading fast.

Is anything else known about Oskar? Well, something. Olga Sarkkila, the long-time director of the Lybecker Institute of Crafts and Design, says in her memoirs that her brother Seth Sanfrid worked as a signing clerk at the Trade House of Johan Lang. The manager, well respected and liked by Seth, was consul Oskar Sovelius. According to Olga, the consul had a great sense of humour: he might put apples and oranges (rare delicacies at that time) in Seth’s writing desk and then later open the desk lid and pretend to wonder: “What game is Sarkkila playing?” The consul also tolerated joking at his own expense. Allegedly, he used to be very sleepy in the morning, so he asked Seth to come wake him up in the mornings. One morning, Seth went to Oskar and said: “Would the consul get up and sign the invoice of the Business College?” The consul got up, got dressed and asked where the invoice was. Seth replied: “It will come when it is brought”. Oskar Sovelius was a member of the Board of Directors of the Raahe Business College in 1883–1896, which is why invoices were brought to him to be signed.

Oskar’s sense of humour is also evident in descriptions of his future wife’s grandmother. Johanna Malmberg writes to her daughter living in Vaasa: “…Without being excellent, Oskar Sovelius is a funny, big, handsome, not self-important, established and serious young man…”

The museum was actually taken care of entirely by its founder Carl Robert Ehrström. In 1879, the aged district physician proposed to the Town Council of Raahe that his younger colleague, Dr Frans Neovius, take over the museum. That was decided. Obviously, Neovius did not identify with museum work: after Ehrström’s death in 1881, Consul Sovelius, who wanted the job, was appointed to the management of the museum. Did the collections of minerals and birds’ eggs gathered at a young age suggest a budding museum man in Oskar? Oskar Sovelius worked as the museum’s curator for the rest of his life. We owe a great deal of thanks to Oskar Sovelius as, without his contribution, it might well be that Ehrström’s collections would have been forgotten to gather dust in some attic and gradually disappear altogether.

“UUSI SUOMETAR, 5 December 1896

Obituary: Fredrik Oskar Sovelius, Vice Consul of Sweden, Norway and Denmark in Raahe, died of a heart attack on the 2nd of this month. Born in 1854, the deceased was a little over 41 years old at the time of his death. He was a wholesaler throughout his lifetime and became the owner of a trading and shipping company called Johan Lang in 1891. He became a vice consul over a decade ago. He was the chairman of a trading company for some time and a delegate for many years. The deceased, who had recently been sickly, is survived by his widow, née Borg, and four children.”

After Oskar Sovelius, his wife Rosa Sovelius organised the Raahe Museum and ran the Museum Society.