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1843–1866, floor instance and township test
The pattern the audit table describes — itinerants on the main street before any studio — is Fort Wayne's documented opening. Mr. Keith (possibly David Keith of Poughkeepsie, New York), advertising in 1843, is per Griswold the first daguerreian in Fort Wayne; J. L. Hubbell followed in November–December 1843 at the American House. The trade stayed itinerant for years: Henry Trevitt worked three weeks in April 1848 at the Hedekin House; F. M. Foster two weeks in June 1849 in rooms above B. Mason's store on Columbia Street; I. L. Telliga, a Polish immigrant ("Col. Tellagher"), opened the first permanent gallery at the Hedekin House about 1844; "Mr. Caldwell and Lady" worked over B. Smith's store in November 1850, and Dexter B. Andrews took rooms above Smith's store the same year.
The decade person by person: Archibald McDonald (also McDonnell), in Buffalo in 1848, moved to Fort Wayne in December 1850 and worked above B. Mason's store, then from February 1851 in Garnsey's Building, Phoenix Block, on Calhoun Street, and from June 1852 at No. 2 Phoenix Block. He took recognition at the Indiana State Fair in 1853; in September 1857 he opened a second gallery above Evans & Co. Dry Goods at Calhoun and Main, advertising photographs, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, melanotypes, sphereotypes, scenereotypes and "Patent Leather Pictures." In January 1859 he sold the gallery to L. R. Bronk, formerly of Mathew Brady's establishment. Beatty, citing Craig's Daguerreian Registry (p. 242) and Griswold's Pictorial History (1:370), calls McDonald the most prolific daguerreian of the 1850s in the city. Charles C. Stevens, of Kennebunkport, Maine, advertised June to November 1852 as "C. C. Stevens and Brother" at John Fairfield's house on Main Street; in the fall of 1852 he took the only known image of the last blockhouse of the 1816 fort, friends seated in front of it, shortly before its demolition — one of the oldest outdoor photographs extant for any place in Indiana, held today by the History Center in Fort Wayne. Byron H. Benham (b. Elba, New York, ca. 1828; d. Norwalk, Ohio, 21 August 1866) arrived in November 1856, took Hawley & Day's rooms, and in 1857 opened a new studio at the southeast corner of Calhoun and Columbia; per Griswold he was the first in Fort Wayne to offer paper photographs. His wife Almira (McKelvey) Benham (b. Plymouth, Ohio, 6 May 1831; d. Norwalk, Ohio, 1913) in May 1858 advertised her own studio as "Mrs. A. A. Benham" — the Ladies Picture Gallery, on the west side of Calhoun between Main and Columbia, in rooms formerly occupied by Archibald McDonald. Beatty identifies her as the earliest documented female photographer with her own studio in Fort Wayne; Craig's registry corroborates both Benhams at Fort Wayne.
Tested against Granger ground, the decade is empty, and the searches are these. Craig's Daguerreian Registry places no daguerreian in Clay or Harris township; its only 1850s listing for the nearer boundary is C. A. Stover, daguerreian and ambrotypist in South Bend 1858–1861 — four doors south of the Post Office, second floor, in 1858–59, and on Michigan Street in 1860–61. The Clay and Harris township chapters of Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907), read whole for other legs of this section, name no photographer. One name does touch the ground at birth: Thomas H. Bulla, of the South Bend firm Bulla Bros. (88 Michigan Street, 1873–1877) and of Elkhart studios, is recorded by the Indiana Album (CATNUM 976, citing Chapman 1880, pp. 514–17, and Howard 1907, pp. 146–47) as born at "South Bend, Clay Twp, St. Joseph County, IN" — born on township ground, if the record's phrasing holds, but his trade was always in the cities. No itinerant's advertisement, no township sitter's portrait credit, and no studio has been found for Clay or Harris in the daguerreian decade or the generation after it.