Edward Alexander MacDowell (1860-1908) was an American composer, virtuoso pianist, and intellectual. Proud of his Scots Protestant heritage, he changed his family name from McDowell back to that of his great-grandfather. It appears that the rest of his family, including his parents, did the same. His wife kept his memory alive in an artists' colony through which passed Edward Arlington Robinson, Thornton Wilder, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Doris Grumbach, Louise Talma, Roy Harris, and others.