Firm

J. H. Bolles’s photographic gallery

The Charleston gallery of Jesse Henry Bolles, for whom Alma A. Pelot was working when he made the first photographs of Fort Sumter after its surrender, on 15 April 1861. It stood at No. 331 King Street.

Bolles is on the record twice over: as Pelot’s employer in April 1861, and as the man who advertised the resulting views in the Charleston papers later that month.

Where the gallery stood was, until now, one of the open questions in this section. It is open no longer: Frederick Ford's census of Charleston for 1861 — a house-by-house survey of the whole city, taken under the authority of the City Council — lists Jesse H. Bolles as the occupant of No. 331 King Street, on the west side, in Ward 4. The same census gives his house as No. 48 St. Philip Street and his name in full: Jesse Henry Bolles.

A later address is documented too. A stereograph in the Library of Congress — an Osborn & Durbec negative of about 1860, printed and sold long afterward — carries the imprint “Jesse A. Bolles, cor. King & Market Streets”, and the Library dates the printing between 1873 and 1877 from the years Teal gives for that studio.

Note the initial. The Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art both write Jesse H. Bolles, and the 1861 census writes Jesse Henry; that 1870s mount reads Jesse A. Bolles. All three forms are recorded here and none is corrected.

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