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1853; 1869 — 1897
Twenty-five years at the camera, ended by fire: Carl Sommer — the name also appears as Charles Sommers — was born in Baden or Württemberg in 1830. When he declared his citizenship in Allen County in 1856 he claimed to have immigrated to New York in 1855; the declaration is wrong, as Beatty notes, for Sommer was in Allen County on 26 December 1849, when he married Sophia Ohm, and all his children were born in Indiana. He was probably the Charles Sommers who advertised in October 1853 that he was "putting up daguerreotypes for one dollar, in order to close out his stock," from a studio on Wayne Street west of the Palo Alto Hotel. The census of 1860 lists him as a bookbinder. From the directory of 1869–70 he appears as a photographer again, at the corner of Calhoun and Columbia as a manufacturer of ambrotypes and gems, then at 111 Water Street, at 4 East Columbia, at 3 Phoenix Block, and from 1877 at 30 Calhoun Street, where he continued until the directory of 1894–95 — when his business and all of his equipment were destroyed in the fire that consumed the Vordermark block. He was, in Beatty's judgment, "one of the most enduring photographers in the city in the nineteenth century." He died in Fort Wayne on 14 March 1897, and his obituary, like Shoaff's after him, claims him as the city's first photographer — which, the directory record states plainly, is incorrect.
Sources:
- John D. Beatty, Directory of Fort Wayne Photographers 1843–1930 — entry for Carl Sommer, citing Craig's Daguerreian Directory, p. 352, the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, 18 March 1897, Fort Wayne city directories, 1867–1895, and Allen County naturalization records.