The first cameras at Fort Sumter

On the morning of 15 April 1861, with the fires in Fort Sumter barely out and the Federal garrison a day gone, a photographer landed at the fort with a camera and a chest of chemicals. His name was Alma Pelot and he was working for Jesse Bolles, whose gallery he operated. He made a series of large-plate views: the terreplein with its guns dismounted, the gorge, soldiers and top-hatted civilians arranged among the wreckage, and the Confederate flag flying over what had been United States property the previous week.

The Charleston Mercury noticed him the next day. Later that month Bolles advertised the pictures in the papers.

Then Osborn

The second firm was Osborn & Durbec, and its senior partner went out in his own time. The Charleston Courier of 23 April reported the results:

allowed to visit Fort Sumter, and has taken 26 different views of the fort, internal and external. Mr. Osborn has also visited Morris and Sullivan’s Island, and has taken several views of these points, all of which we may expect to see in a few days.Charleston Courier, 23 April 1861, quoted by Bob Zeller

Twenty-six views. Whatever else is uncertain, the scale of what Osborn did is not.

Why the attributions came apart

Both series went north almost at once, printed as cartes de visite and stereographs on mounts carrying the name of Edward Anthony of New York. Anthony was the publisher. He did not make the negatives, and his mounts frequently do not say who did.

An album at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows the tangle in a single object: sixteen cards of Fort Sumter and the harbor batteries, given to a Mrs. Crawford Washington in 1862, of which the museum assigns two to Osborn’s Gallery and attributes the rest to Pelot and Bolles. One album, two Charleston firms, one New York publisher.

The historian Bob Zeller, who wrote about these photographs in 1997 and again in 2005, later corrected his own earlier account in public, and his correction is the clearest statement of where the matter now stands: only two Charleston photographic firms photographed Fort Sumter after the April 1861 surrender. Pelot, working for Bolles, was there on 15 April, with his presence documented in the Mercury the next day. The exact days of Osborn’s visits are not known; the Courier reported them on the 23rd.

What this section does about it

It keeps the institutions’ own words. The Library of Congress credits Pelot and says the credit comes from Zeller. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Charleston Museum attribute jointly to Pelot and Bolles. Osborn’s Gallery appears as publisher on some cards and as photographer on two. None of that is tidied up here into a single confident sentence, because the evidence does not support one.