Frank R. Barrows and "the finest gallery in the State"

1880 — 1900

Twenty years, three addresses, one boast: Frank Rufus Barrows was born at Sturgis, Michigan, in August 1854 and arrived in Fort Wayne in 1880, opening a studio with Frank H. Clayton at 18 West Berry Street, a room that had been George Palmer's and Charles Wallin's before them. The next year he was sole proprietor, and he remained at 18 West Berry until 1888. The directory of 1889–90 puts him at 62 Calhoun Street; in 1893–94 he moved to 21–23 West Berry, and thereafter appears at 23 West Berry until 1900, advertising the business as Barrow's Art Gallery, "the finest and best appointed Gallery in the State" — his own advertisement's words, quoted here as the claim they were. His younger brother Charles V. Barrows kept a photographer's listing next door at 16 West Berry from 1888 to 1891, a family row of studios on one block. Barrows's studio took many of the photographs used in Fort Wayne Illustrated, the Commercial Publishing Company's 1897 portrait of the city, which makes his camera one of the two or three through which the 1890s city is now seen. After leaving Fort Wayne he kept a studio at Medford, Massachusetts, and died at Eugene, Oregon, on 29 July 1920. Felix Schanz, the subject of a later entry, learned the Fort Wayne trade in Barrows's rooms.

Sources:

1. John D. Beatty, Directory of Fort Wayne Photographers 1843–1930 — entries for Frank Rufus Barrows and Charles V. Barrows, citing Fort Wayne city directories, 1880–1900, Fort Wayne Illustrated (Commercial Publishing Co., 1897), the Fort Wayne Gazette's Art Souvenir of Representative Men (1894), and the News-Sentinel, 27 August 1920.