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1856 — 1866
The Civil War era's first studio, kept by a husband and wife: Byron H. Benham was born at Elba, Genesee County, New York, about 1828, worked at Newark, Ohio, in 1853, and moved his family to Fort Wayne in November 1856, taking the rooms formerly occupied by Hawley and Day on Columbia Street. In 1857 he opened a new studio at the southeast corner of Calhoun and Columbia. He was one of the most prolific Fort Wayne photographers of the Civil War era, together with John A. Shoaff, who kept a rival studio, and Griswold credits him as the first photographer in Fort Wayne to offer paper photographs in place of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes. He died at Norwalk, Ohio, on 21 August 1866, the year his Fort Wayne advertising ends.
His wife Almira (McKelvey) Benham, born at Plymouth, Ohio, on 6 May 1831, holds a first of her own. In May 1858, advertising as "Mrs. A. A. Benham," she opened her own studio, the Ladies Picture Gallery, on the west side of Calhoun between Main and Columbia, in rooms formerly occupied by Archibald McDonald. She is, on the directory record, the earliest documented female photographer with her own studio in Fort Wayne. The family moved to Norwalk, Ohio, about 1864; she died there in 1913, nearly half a century after the two seasons her gallery appears in the record.
Sources:
- John D. Beatty, Directory of Fort Wayne Photographers 1843–1930 — entries for Byron H. Benham and Almira (McKelvey) Benham, citing Craig's Daguerreian Directory, p. 33, the 1860 federal census, Firelands Pioneer (January 1920), Griswold, Pictorial History, 1: 434, and Fort Wayne city directories, 1858–1866/67.