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1866 — 1883
A painter, a carpenter, and a patent: Joseph H. Dille was born near Cleveland, Ohio, in 1832 to parents born in Alsace-Lorraine. He appears in the Fort Wayne directory of 1866–67 in partnership with Augustus C. Crane in a Photograph Gallery at 136 Columbia, and in 1868–69 alone as portrait painter and photographer at 44 Calhoun Street, opposite the courthouse; he worked from photographs to produce chalk drawings and tinted photographs made to look like paintings, and afterward devoted himself to painting in oil and watercolor. Elisha W. Poston, born in Ohio about 1833, was enumerated in Fort Wayne in 1870 as a house carpenter who had taken up photography. Together the two men held a patent in "improvement in solar-cameras" — the enlarging camera of the era — which they sold to John A. Shoaff in 1872.
Poston's lasting work is a series of views of the city he made in 1878–79 from the rooftops of its buildings — images Beatty describes as aerial views, the city's first portrait of itself from above, decades before the airplane. The series is now part of the History Center collection. Poston kept his studio at 44 Calhoun into 1881 — the address passed afterward to Maurice Jones — then left the city. He died in Henry County, Iowa, on 4 July 1883, aged fifty-one, with the death record still listing him as a photographer.
Sources:
- John D. Beatty, Directory of Fort Wayne Photographers 1843–1930 — entries for Joseph H. Dille and Elisha W. Poston, citing Wilbur D. Peat, Pioneer Painters of Indiana, pp. 114–115, American Photographic Patents, 1840–1880, the federal censuses of 1870 and 1880, and Fort Wayne city directories, 1866–1881.