Sources, rights and what is still open

Research status

Works, repositories and rights

Open questions

• Alma A. Pelot’s birth and death dates, and anything of his life beyond his Charleston working years. He is not in the 1861 city census under his own name.
• Osborn & Durbec at 223 King Street or at 245. The firm’s own mounts print 223; Ford’s census of 1861 puts them at 245. Either the depot moved, or the mounts carried a stale number — and Quinby’s 261 agrees between mount and census, which argues against the two schemes simply differing.
• Washington Peale’s dates, and whether he belonged to the Philadelphia Peale family of painters as the shared surname suggests.
• Whether Philip Haas held a commission. One collection guide styles him lieutenant; his Library of Congress entry gives Company A, 1st New York Engineers.
• George S. Cook’s birthplace: Stratford or Stamford, Connecticut.
• W. E. James’s year of birth: 1835 or 1841.
• Whether Cook moved between 1852 and 1861, or the street was renumbered under him: Craig’s Registry has him at 235 King in 1852, Ford’s census at 265 King in 1861.
• Converting a wartime King Street number to a modern building. The block is now settled — see below — but the building is not, and the Sanborn surveys cannot settle it: those of May 1884 and June 1888 both postdate the city’s renumbering, and the 1888 index puts the Lutheran church at 405 King, where St. Matthew’s stands today.
• Whether the drift between the numbering schemes is as small everywhere on King Street as it is between Beaufain and Liberty, where it runs from about four doors to none. Two anchors is two, not a survey.
• Which buildings, if any, survive. The City Engineer’s Plat Book at the Lowcountry Digital Library gives measured frontages lot by lot at the King and Beaufain corner, and Historic Charleston Foundation photographed every building on this stretch in 1967 and 1970. Between them they could settle it. Doing so means following particular lots through the plats and the conveyance record — title research, and it has not been done here.
• A trap, recorded so nobody falls into it. A building at 265 King Street today is associated with a Cook photographic studio, and Ford’s census puts George S. Cook at 265 King in 1861. The numbers are the same and the claim is not: the street was renumbered twice in between, and the studio at that modern address is his son George LaGrange Cook’s, of the later 1880s. Nothing traced here shows the father’s wartime gallery standing at the modern 265.
• Which of the April 1865 Fort Sumter negatives in the Library of Congress’s LOT 4166-C are Barnard’s and which are Cooley’s. The catalog credits one to each and leaves the rest without a creator.
• J. F. Coonley’s training and Anthony employment, which rest on secondary compilations rather than a traced primary source.
• Selmar Rush Seibert: everything except the National Archives credit.

Bibliography

• Garry Adelman, John Richter and Bob Zeller, eds., 99 Historic Images of Civil War Charleston (Center for Civil War Photography, 2009). https://www.civilwarphotography.org/
• George N. Barnard, Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (New York, 1866).
• “The Street Numbers of Peninsular Charleston,” Charleston County Public Library. https://www.ccpl.org/street-numbers-peninsular-charleston
• City Engineer’s Plat Book, 1671–1951, City of Charleston, on permanent loan to The Charleston Archive at Charleston County Public Library; digitized by the Lowcountry Digital Library, College of Charleston. Public domain; contact The Charleston Archive for reuse requirements. https://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/
• “17 April 1861: Two stereo views of Fort Sumter,” Civil War Day by Day, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 17 April 2011, with a correction posted in the comments by Bob Zeller. Item: folder 222(b), Miscellaneous Pictures, #4090. https://web.lib.unc.edu/civilwar/index.php/2011/04/17/17-april-1861-two-stereo-views-of-fort-sumter/
• John S. Craig, Craig’s Daguerreian Registry (Torrington, Conn.: John S. Craig), consulted through Pioneer American Photographers.
• David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. https://www.davidrumsey.com/
• Stephen Davis and Jack W. Melton Jr., 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War (Charleston: Historical Publications LLC, 2020).
• “George Smith Cook (23 February 1819–27 November 1902),” Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia, Richmond. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Cook_George_Smith
• Frederick A. Ford, Census of the City of Charleston, South Carolina, for the Year 1861, Illustrated by Statistical Tables, Prepared under the Authority of the City Council (Charleston, 1861). The street lists give, for every house on every street, the number, the owner and the occupant. https://archive.org/details/censusofcityofch00char
• “Jacob F. Coonley, Photographer,” Historic Camera library. https://historiccamera.com/
• 1967 King Street Survey Collection and Photograph Survey of the “Charleston Center” Site, Historic Charleston Foundation, digitized by the Lowcountry Digital Library, College of Charleston. Copyright © Historic Charleston Foundation; all rights reserved. https://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/
• Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/
• “Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints: Background and Scope of the Collection,” Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/cwp/background.html
• National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. https://catalog.archives.gov/
• “George Cook,” Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park, National Park Service (page last updated 17 June 2015). https://www.nps.gov/people/george-cook.htm
• New-York Historical Society Library, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections, New York. https://www.nyhistory.org/library
• OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Used for the modern street intersections this section pins approximate locations to. https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
• Pioneer American Photographers, 1839–1860 — a compilation of period advertisements, directory entries and registry records, with each entry citing the periodical or directory it came from. https://pioneeramericanphotographers.com/
• “George LaGrange Cook Photograph Collection,” South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina Digital Collections. https://digital.library.sc.edu/collections/george-lagrange-cook-photograph-collection/
• Harvey S. Teal, Partners with the Sun: South Carolina Photographers, 1840–1940 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).
• Photograph Collection, The Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina. https://www.charlestonmuseum.org/research/
• Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection
• The William E. James Stereograph Collection. https://wejames.com/
• Orlando M. Poe Papers, Special Collections, United States Military Academy Library, West Point, N.Y.
• Bob Zeller, The Blue and Gray in Black and White: A History of Civil War Photography (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005).
• Bob Zeller, The Civil War in Depth: History in 3-D (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997).