Maurice L. Jones: from the studio chair to the Kodak counter

1878 — 1926

The longest tenure in the field: Maurice LaMott Jones was born in North Manchester, Indiana, on 11 August 1848, served in several Indiana regiments during the Civil War — the 39th and 118th Indiana Infantry and the Eighth Indiana Cavalry — and marched with Sherman to the sea. He graduated from Bryant & Stratton's Commercial College in Indianapolis, sold sewing machines and briefly kept a photograph studio at Peru, and arrived in Fort Wayne in 1876. After a year's partnership with Daniel H. Hamilton he established his own studio at 44 Calhoun Street, formerly Elisha Poston's. The census of 1880 lists him as a photographer along with his wife, Belle M., and an assistant, Millie Wills, aged twenty-three — three working photographers in one household, two of them women, a fact the census keeps and the directories mostly do not. In 1891 Jones gave up studio photography for the photographic-supply business, and with his son Harry became a dealer in Kodak cameras and film at 112 West Wayne Street, selling the portable cameras that were ending the studio era he had begun in. In 1905 he announced plans to expand into West Virginia and Pennsylvania with four traveling salesmen. He remained in business until 1926, in Beatty's words "having one of the city's longest tenures in this field" — forty-eight years in the Fort Wayne photographic trade. He died at Lake Worth, Florida, on 24 February 1938 and was buried in Lindenwood Cemetery.

Sources:

1. John D. Beatty, Directory of Fort Wayne Photographers 1843–1930 — entry for Maurice LaMott Jones, citing Griswold, Pictorial History, 1: 502, Robert S. Robertson, Valley of the Upper Maumee River, 2: 174–175, Griswold, Some Fort Wayne Phizes, p. 155, Ft. Wayne, Indiana 1905 (1905), p. 21, the Journal-Gazette, 25 February 1938, and Fort Wayne city directories, 1877–1926.