Working location
Osborn & Durbec’s Southern Stereoscopic & Photographic Depot
No. 223 King Street · Charleston, South Carolina
Approximate historical location. Not the building. The point is the middle of the King Street commercial corridor between Market and Calhoun streets, taken from the two intersections in OpenStreetMap. The period street number cannot be converted to a modern one.
The address is printed on the mounts themselves: Charleston, S.C. : Osborn & Durbec’s Southern Stereoscopic & Photographic Depot, 223 King Street. It appears on the firm’s Fort Moultrie, Fort Sumter, Mills House and Rockville plantation stereographs alike, which is the soundest kind of evidence for a business address — the artifact says so.
With one complication. Ford's census of 1861 puts the firm at No. 245 King Street, not 223. Both are recorded in this section, on separate pages, because the evidence for each is good and the two cannot be reconciled from what survives.
The numbering problem
Charleston's present street numbers date from the city-wide renumbering carried out under contract from 1882 and finished before the earthquake of 31 August 1886. A wartime number and a modern number of the same name are not the same address, and no conversion table survives, so this location is not matched to a modern parcel.
Who worked here
- James M. Osborn1811 – 1868
- Frederick Eugene Durbec1836 – 1 October 1894
What is there now
Not established. No modern parcel is claimed for this address.
Where the address comes from
- Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/
Where the coordinate comes from
- OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Used for the modern street intersections this section pins approximate locations to. https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
- “The Street Numbers of Peninsular Charleston,” Charleston County Public Library. https://www.ccpl.org/street-numbers-peninsular-charleston
Sources
- Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/
- Stephen Davis and Jack W. Melton Jr., 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War (Charleston: Historical Publications LLC, 2020).
- 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