The trade at sampled years: what the directories actually show

1867, 1875, and the 1863–1921 list — counts stated, never extended

The measure: This section counts the portrait trade only where a directory page was read, and prints the counts at that size. Holland's South Bend directory of 1867 carries two names under its classified heading "Photograph Galleries": William Gibson and A. McDonald. Turner's directory of 1875, at page 174, lists Bulla Bros. and E. E. Pool, with McDonald advertising at 107 and 109 Michigan in the same volume — three houses for the city that year. The South Bend Area Genealogical Society's compiled list, "South Bend and Mishawaka Photographers, 1863–1921," is the frame the Indiana Photographers Project harvested, working from Holland's of 1867, Turner's editions of 1873–74, 1875 and 1877, Hibberd's of 1899–1900, and the Polk gazetteers; within that frame the named South Bend practitioners of the long studio era, each carried in full in his own entry in this section, are Stover (from the daguerreian registry, 1858–61), McDonald, VanSickle, Beckwith, the Bullas, Gibson, Pool, Luckhaus, and Sosnowski, with the McDonald succession — Rode, the unnamed owner of 1929–33, Thompsett, the Patnaudes — carrying the founding house through the twentieth century on the studio's own tradition. No total for any unread year is offered, and no growth curve is drawn through the sampled points: two galleries in 1867 and three houses in 1875 are facts; anything between or beyond them would be arithmetic, not record. One absence in the frame is stated plainly: no woman appears as a studio proprietor in the South Bend records the society's list and the project's harvest reached. That is a finding about the records searched, printed as such; the Fort Wayne directory of the same trade does carry women proprietors, and the contrast belongs to the record, not to an explanation this section does not have.

Sources:

1. Holland's South Bend Directory (1867) — the "Photograph Galleries" heading: Gibson and McDonald, as cited in the Indiana Photographers Project's notes.
2. Turner's South Bend Directory (1875), p. 174 — Bulla Bros. and E. E. Pool listed; McDonald's advertisement, 107 & 109 Michigan, in the same edition.