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1850 — 1859
From Buffalo to the Phoenix Block: Archibald McDonald worked in Buffalo, New York, in 1848 under his family name, McDonnell, and moved to Fort Wayne in December 1850, opening a studio above B. Mason's store. In February 1851 he moved to Garnsey's Building in the Phoenix Block on Calhoun Street; that year he returned east to learn improvements in his field, and in June 1852 he announced that he had relocated permanently to the city, with a gallery at No. 2 Phoenix Block above Jacob's shoe store. The following year he received recognition at the Indiana State Fair for his work. In September 1857 he opened a second gallery above the Evans & Co. dry goods store at Calhoun and Main, advertising photographs, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, melanotypes, sphereotypes, scenereotypes, and "Patent Leather Pictures" — the full catalogue of the era's processes from one man's rooms. Beatty's directory judges him "the most prolific daguerreian of the 1850s in the city." In January 1859 he sold the Calhoun and Main gallery to L. R. Bronk and may have moved to Canada. The buyer is a footnote with a famous name in it: Edwin Bronk had worked in Mathew Brady's New York City gallery in 1851, before St. Louis and Columbus — so for a season the most famous photographic house in America had a former hand keeping a gallery at Calhoun and Main.
Sources:
- John D. Beatty, Directory of Fort Wayne Photographers 1843–1930 — entries for Archibald McDonald and Edwin/L. R. Bronk, citing Craig's Daguerreian Directory, pp. 242 and 49–50, Griswold, Pictorial History, 1: 370, and the Fort Wayne City Directory of 1858–59.