The Bells of Washington

From the American Revolution to the C. M. Bell Photographic Studio

The story of the Bell photographers begins long before the invention of photography, before Washington became a city of marble government buildings and crowded avenues, and before a camera could preserve the expression on a human face. It begins with Isaac Bell and his wife, Jemima Clark Bell, members of the generation that witnessed the creation of the American republic.

Isaac Bell was a veteran of the American Revolution. He served when the United States was not yet an established nation, when independence remained uncertain, and the survival of the American cause depended upon men willing to risk their lives for an idea. The precise record of his military service requires further examination, but the central fact is clear. The Bell family's documented history reaches back to the struggle that created the country. Revolutionary service did not necessarily bring financial security. Compensation was often delayed, pensions were difficult to obtain, and veterans or their widows could spend years assembling affidavits and proving claims before federal authorities. Isaac and Jemima were the parents of Francis Hamilton Bell, born in Orange County, New York, in 1809. Isaac Bell died on December 29, 1813, when his son Francis was five years old. The surviving pension references do not establish the place or cause of his death.

After Isaac's death, Jemima sought pension relief based upon his wartime service. Her effort placed her among the thousands of widows who petitioned the government for recognition of sacrifices made decades earlier. These claims depended upon memory, testimony, military records, marriage evidence, and the willingness of former neighbors or comrades to confirm events from the distant past. Francis belonged to the first generation of the family born into the new nation for which his father had fought. He inherited a family history marked by military service, practical labor, endurance, and a willingness to move in search of opportunity.

Francis carried the Bell family south. By 1840, he was living in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with his wife, Sarah B. Wood Bell, and their growing household. Fredericksburg was an old commercial town situated on the Rappahannock River, tied to the surrounding farms and plantations and positioned on the principal route between Richmond and Washington. It was a place of merchants, craftsmen, tavern keepers, laborers, and small manufacturers.

Francis worked as a gunsmith and later as a locksmith. Both were exacting trades. A gunsmith needed patience, mechanical understanding, a sure eye, and a steady hand. Metal parts had to be shaped and fitted with precision. A lock had to answer reliably to its key. A firearm had to function safely. A slight misalignment could ruin the whole mechanism. These same habits would later serve the Bell family in photography. Cameras, lenses, plate holders, chemicals, shutters, posing devices, and skylights demanded the mind of a mechanic as much as the eye of an artist. Photography in the nineteenth century was not a matter of pressing a button. It required the preparation of materials, knowledge of chemistry, careful control of light, and the ability to diagnose problems when a process failed.

Francis and Sarah raised a large family. Their children included William Hamilton Bell, Jackson Wood Bell, Sarah F. Bell, Thomas Henry Bell, Nephi Bell, James Edward Bell, and Charles Milton Bell. The children came of age during a period of astonishing change. Railroads were spreading across the country. Cities were growing. Steam power was altering transportation and industry. The telegraph was carrying information faster than any horse or train. Political divisions over slavery were deepening. Then came photography.

The daguerreotype was announced to the world in 1839, one year before Francis Bell appeared in the Fredericksburg census. For the first time, light could be made to preserve a detailed image of the visible world. A face no longer had to be interpreted by a painter. The camera recorded the lines around the eyes, the texture of clothing, the arrangement of hair, and the particular way a person held his or her mouth. To nineteenth-century Americans, the result seemed close to miraculous. Here was not merely a likeness, but the shadow of the person made permanent. By 1850, Francis and Sarah were still living in Fredericksburg. Francis, then about forty, was working as a gunsmith. His eldest son, William, was beginning in the same trade. The household also included Jackson, Sarah, Nephi, James, and Charles, who was then two years old.

Sometime during the 1850s, the Bell family moved from Fredericksburg to Washington. By 1860, Francis was listed there as a gunsmith and locksmith in Washington, D.C. Sarah and several of their children were living with him. Washington was still a comparatively small city, but it offered opportunities unavailable in Fredericksburg. The federal government brought a constant movement of officeholders, military officers, diplomats, clerks, contractors, petitioners, and visitors. Pennsylvania Avenue served as both commercial thoroughfare and ceremonial route, connecting the Capitol with the White House.

By 1860, two of the Bell sons had already entered photography. Jackson, about twenty-one, was listed as an ambrotypist. Nephi, only sixteen, was also working in the trade. At an age when many boys were beginning an apprenticeship, Nephi Bell was practicing one of the newest and most technically demanding arts in America. An ambrotype was made on glass through the wet plate collodion process. The plate had to be cleaned, coated, sensitized, placed in the camera, exposed, developed, fixed, washed, dried, and mounted. Much of the work had to be completed while the chemicals remained wet. Light, temperature, timing, and cleanliness all mattered. Dust could spoil the plate. A poorly mixed solution could flatten the image. An exposure that lasted too long or ended too soon could ruin the result.

Nephi appears to have worked with photographer Henry W. Turner at the Metropolitan Photograph and Ambrotype Gallery at 480 Pennsylvania Avenue. Advertisements associated with the gallery offered ambrotypes in cases for twenty-five cents and photographs for one dollar. Customers were assured that good pictures could be taken in any weather, a familiar claim among photographers competing for the same public. Jackson also entered the photographic business, possibly working with Allen Freeman Hall, another photographer who later married Jackson's sister, Sarah F. Bell. From the beginning, photography among the Bells was a family enterprise. Brothers worked with brothers. A daughter married a photographer. Sons followed their father into business. Gallery names changed, partnerships shifted, and cameras, equipment, negatives, and business goodwill passed from one operator to another.

By 1862, the name Bell & Bro. appeared in the Washington directories at 480 Pennsylvania Avenue. Bell & Bro. should not be understood as a permanent partnership between the same two individuals. The name represented a changing family concern. Francis, Thomas, Nephi, Jackson, William, and eventually Charles appear to have participated at different times. The studio name remained stable even as the men behind it changed. This flexibility was common in nineteenth-century photography. A gallery could retain an established name while ownership, employees, and operators shifted. The public trusted the name on the sign. The name suggested that older negatives would still be available and that the reputation of the business would continue.

The rise of Bell & Bro. coincided with the Civil War, which transformed Washington almost overnight. Soldiers filled the streets. Government departments expanded into rented buildings. Hospitals occupied schools, churches, hotels, and private homes. Supply wagons crowded the avenues. Officers, enlisted men, nurses, contractors, politicians, foreign observers, and anxious relatives moved through the city. Photography became part of the experience of war. Soldiers preparing to leave for the front visited galleries to have portraits made for mothers, wives, sweethearts, and children. Officers exchanged photographs with comrades. Families mailed likenesses across great distances. A portrait made before a regiment departed might become the last image a family ever received.

The war brought customers to Washington photographers. It also brought grief to the Bell household.

Nephi Bell died in Washington on November 22, 1862. He was nineteen years old. The surviving record does not establish the cause of his death. Illness was common in wartime Washington, where overcrowding, poor sanitation, contaminated water, and infectious disease threatened civilians as well as soldiers. Nephi's short life had carried him from Fredericksburg to Washington and into the first generation of the city's professional photographers. He was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery.

Another son, Thomas Henry Bell, worked at Bell & Bro. during the Civil War. His 1863 draft registration described him as an artist. The designation is significant. The Bells did not regard photography as a purely mechanical occupation. A good portrait required an understanding of pose, expression, clothing, background, balance, and light. The operator had to recognize how a sitter wished to be seen and then produce an image that met that expectation. By 1866, Thomas was far from Washington. He died at Humaitá in Paraguay during the Paraguayan War. The circumstances that brought him to South America remain uncertain. He was drawn there through military employment. Disease and deprivation killed enormous numbers during the conflict, but the surviving record does not provide a final explanation for his death.

The Bells also experienced the divided loyalties of the American Civil War within their extended family. In 1864, Francis wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton seeking the release of two relatives from Fredericksburg, Thomas Manuel and Joseph Hall. The men had been arrested and confined in Washington. Francis argued that they had not taken up arms against the United States. He maintained that they were willing to swear allegiance, obey federal law, and abandon their former political prejudices. They had been arrested, he explained, while attempting to care for their families. The men were eventually exchanged. The episode reveals how imperfectly the war's political divisions matched the realities of family life. The Bells had left Virginia for Washington and operated a business in the capital of the Union. Their relatives remained in Fredericksburg, where armies repeatedly passed through, and civilians could be questioned, arrested, displaced, or imprisoned according to circumstances beyond their control.

Bell & Bro. survived the war.

Francis himself made the transition from gunsmith to photographer. By the late 1860s, stereographic views were being credited to F. H. Bell of Bell & Bro. He was not merely the father of the young photographers or a financial supporter of the business. He had entered the profession and was producing photographic work under his own name. His eldest son, William Hamilton Bell, followed a similar course. William began as a gunsmith and later became an ambrotypist and photographer. For a time, he worked with his brother-in-law, Allen Freeman Hall, under the name Bell & Hall at 480 Pennsylvania Avenue. Hall later established a gallery in Charlestown, West Virginia. William continued in photography and eventually worked in Baltimore. His son, Thomas L. Bell, also became a photographer, carrying the family occupation into another generation.

Sarah F. Bell, although not identified as a photographer, became part of the family's photographic network through her marriage to Allen Hall. Her experience also reminds us that surviving directories rarely reveal the full contribution of women to a studio. Wives and daughters often scheduled appointments, received customers, kept accounts, prepared mounts, retouched photographs, arranged clothing, soothed children, and helped manage family businesses without appearing under their own names.

In 1870, Washington changed the numbering of its streets. Before that year, buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue had been numbered outward from the Capitol in a confusing sequence. Under the new arrangement, the Bell gallery's old address at 480 Pennsylvania Avenue became approximately 317 or 319 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. What appears in the directory record to be a move may therefore have been a change in number rather than a change in physical location. By then, the youngest Bell son was emerging as the family's most ambitious photographer.

Charles Milton Bell had grown up among gunsmiths, cameras, chemicals, glass plates, skylights, painted backgrounds, and the steady movement of customers. He began working at Bell & Bro. during the late 1860s. By 1870, he was associated with his father at the Pennsylvania Avenue gallery. Charles inherited more than a business. He inherited the accumulated knowledge of an entire family. He had seen Jackson and Nephi practice the ambrotype. He had watched Francis carry the habits of a gunsmith into photography. He knew how a gallery was furnished, advertised, and maintained. He understood the importance of location, courtesy, technical competence, and a recognizable studio name.

He also understood the value of the negative. A glass negative was the foundation of the photographic business. Once it had been prepared and preserved, additional prints could be ordered months or years later. The negative was therefore more than a record of the sitter. It was a commercial asset and the basis of a continuing relationship between the gallery and its customers. The preservation of negatives helped an established studio survive changes in ownership. Customers returned because they expected the gallery to hold earlier family portraits. A widow might order another likeness of her husband. Parents might request copies of a child's portrait. Public figures needed photographs for newspapers, publishers, political supporters, or government use.

During the 1870s, Charles began building an enterprise distinct from the earlier Bell & Bro. concern. His galleries occupied a succession of Pennsylvania Avenue addresses, including 459, 461, 463, and 465 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Several of these appear to have been adjoining spaces within an expanding establishment rather than separate studios. By the 1880s, the C. M. Bell Studio had become one of the largest and best-known photographic businesses in Washington. Charles also operated a branch gallery at 701 15th Street NW, opposite the Treasury Department.

The location was ideal. Members of Congress, judges, military officers, diplomats, government officials, businessmen, visiting delegations, and society families passed through the surrounding streets. The Bell studio stood close to the political and administrative heart of the country. An advertisement from 1888 styled Charles as a "Photographic Artist." It offered photographs, oil paintings, crayons, watercolors, and outdoor work. It boasted that Bell possessed one of the largest galleries in the United States and assured customers that satisfaction would be guaranteed. By 1893, the language had become even more confident. Charles advertised himself as a "National Photog. Artist." His studio was described as headquarters for photographs of public men, statesmen, jurists, Army and Navy officers, and other prominent figures. Children's photography was presented as a specialty.

The business depended upon reputation, and reputation depended upon more than cameras and chemicals. A photographic sitting could be uncomfortable. The sitter entered an unfamiliar room and was placed beneath the hard light of a skylight. Clothing had to be arranged. The body had to remain still. A hidden support might be placed behind the head or shoulders to prevent movement. Children grew restless. Adults became self-conscious. A successful portrait photographer needed tact.

Contemporary accounts credited Charles with artistic ability, an agreeable manner, and a staff trained to treat customers courteously. The rule of the establishment was said to be politeness to everybody. That principle helped explain why prominent families returned to the Bell galleries and why public figures trusted the studio with their portraits. The Bell studio photographed the nation as it passed through Washington. Presidents and their families sat before its cameras. So did senators, representatives, judges, generals, admirals, clergy, educators, authors, actors, athletes, businessmen, officeholders, Native American delegates, Black families, white families, children, babies, and household pets. The gallery became part studio, part social institution, and part national portrait archive.

In 1880, Charles married Annie Colley, daughter of the proprietor of the Hotel Windsor. The marriage joined the Bell family to the world of Washington hotels, entertainments, politics, and society. The Windsor was more than a place for travelers. It served as a residence, meeting place, and center of social activity. Charles and Annie eventually made their home there. Annie's exact role in the studio during Charles's lifetime is not fully documented. Family tradition suggests that she contributed to the atmosphere of confidence that brought women, children, and society families to the Bell galleries. Such work often disappeared from formal records, but it was essential to a successful portrait establishment.

The surviving photographs offer their own evidence. They reveal careful attention to clothing, pose, family relationships, and the dignity of the sitter. Children appear composed without seeming unnaturally rigid. Women are presented with seriousness and individuality. Families are arranged in ways that suggest an understanding of affection as well as status. The wider Bell family remained involved in business and technical enterprises. Jackson moved among photography, stationery, lithography, and other commercial interests. James Edward Bell pursued work outside photography but remained connected to family ventures.

In 1889, Charles, James, and J. Wood Bell were among the incorporators of the Inventors' and Patentees' Protective Association. Its purpose was to protect inventors and patentees, concentrate their influence at the national capital, and establish a bureau of information. The organization suited a family whose history had long stood at the meeting point of machinery, craftsmanship, invention, and enterprise. In the spring of 1893, Charles attended the great naval review at Hampton Roads. Warships from the United States and foreign nations had assembled for an extraordinary display connected with the celebrations surrounding the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. While there, Charles contracted a severe cold.

After returning to Washington, his condition worsened. At first, the illness did not appear dangerous. He seemed to be improving. On the evening of May 12, however, he suffered a sudden relapse at his home in the Hotel Windsor. He died before a physician could be summoned. Charles Milton Bell was forty-five years old. The following day, the Washington Post described him as one of the most prominent photographers in the national capital. The newspaper praised his collection of Washington views and portraits of famous men made during the preceding twenty-five years. Although comparatively young, it said, he deserved to be regarded as one of the pioneers of photography in Washington.

His wife Annie and their two young sons survived him. Charles was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery, in the Stewart Section, Lot 626 East, near other members of the Bell family.

The death of a studio proprietor frequently brought the sale of the business, the removal of the sign, or the destruction and dispersal of the negatives. That did not happen at C. M. Bell. Annie Colley Bell carried the studio forward. Her stewardship should be understood as one of the central chapters in the Bell family story. Annie did not merely preserve her husband's name as a memorial. She kept a large photographic establishment functioning. Employees had to be retained and paid. Appointments had to be scheduled. Chemicals, glass plates, mounts, paper, cases, and studio furnishings had to be purchased. Accounts had to be kept. Customers returned seeking copies from older negatives. New sitters expected the same quality and courtesy associated with Charles.

Annie also had two young sons to raise. The continuation of the studio after 1893 demonstrates that its success had never depended upon Charles alone. It relied upon trained operators, assistants, finishers, reception staff, printers, retouchers, and clerical workers. Annie preserved that organization and maintained the public confidence attached to the C. M. Bell name. The decision to retain Charles's name was commercially sensible. A respected studio name possessed value independent of the person who had established it. Patrons associated C. M. Bell with quality, discretion, important clientele, and the preservation of family negatives. Changing the name might have weakened the connection between the gallery and generations of customers.

Under Annie's management, the negatives continued to accumulate. The world outside the gallery was changing rapidly. Electric lighting spread through Washington. Streetcars replaced older forms of transportation. Automobiles appeared on the avenues. Women entered professional and public life in growing numbers. The nineteenth-century city was becoming a modern capital. The studio continued to record the people living through that transformation. Among those photographed during the years after Charles's death was Anna Julia Cooper, the distinguished educator, author, and advocate for the advancement of Black women. Her presence in the Bell collection is one example of the extraordinary range of sitters whose lives intersected with the studio.

The post-1893 negatives also demonstrate that Annie preserved the physical archive. This was no small accomplishment. Glass plates were heavy, fragile, and difficult to store. They could break, crack, fade, gather dust, or become separated from their identifying records. Chemicals, heat, moisture, careless handling, and repeated business moves threatened their survival. Yet thousands remained. By 1910, according to the Bell family chronology, Annie's long stewardship came to an end, and the family relinquished the studio. Published institutional summaries date the transfer somewhat imprecisely, sometimes placing it around the turn of the century. The exact legal date and terms of the sale still require documentary confirmation. The surviving chronology, however, identifies 1910 as the end of Annie Colley Bell's management.

The business passed into new hands, associated with Atha and Cunningham, while the C. M. Bell name continued to be used. The purchasers understood the value of what they had acquired. They had not purchased cameras and furniture alone. They had acquired a recognized Washington name, an established clientele, and an archive containing thousands of portraits. The sale ended the Bell family's direct control of an enterprise whose origins reached back to the Civil War era and Bell & Bro. The studio continued operating into the twentieth century, and later photographs were still issued under the Bell name. To customers, the identity of the gallery remained continuous even when the family behind it had departed.

Over time, the negatives changed hands. Portions of the collection were separated, sold, or transferred to private owners and public institutions. Photographs of Native American delegations entered government collections. A large part of the surviving glass plate archive eventually came to the Library of Congress. The negatives had begun as commercial property. They were created so that customers could purchase prints and return for additional copies. As decades passed, the people in the portraits died, families scattered, and the commercial purpose of the plates diminished. Their historical value grew.

The Bell family's achievement cannot be attributed to Charles alone. Isaac Bell carried the family's connection to the American Revolution. Jemima Clark Bell pursued the pension relief owed through that service. Francis Hamilton Bell brought the family south and supplied the discipline of a gunsmith and locksmith. Jackson and Nephi entered photography while the art was still new. Thomas worked as an artist and photographer before dying in South America. William carried the trade into Baltimore and passed it to another generation. Sarah connected the family to photographer Allen Freeman Hall. James and Jackson participated in the technical and commercial world surrounding the Bell name. Charles gathered these strands together. He gave the family enterprise scale, prestige, and national importance.

Annie preserved what he had built. For approximately seventeen years after Charles's death, according to the family chronology, she maintained the studio, its reputation, and its archive. She did so while raising their sons and working in a business culture that rarely acknowledged the authority and labor of women with the same care it gave to men. The Bell family's history is also the history of American photography. They began with ambrotypes offered for a few cents. They worked through the Civil War, when a photograph might become the last likeness a soldier's family ever received. They moved into stereographs, cartes de visite, cabinet photographs, large glass negatives, lithography, painted enlargements, and elaborate galleries built beneath great skylights.

They photographed a republic moving from the age of the surviving Revolutionary generation into the twentieth century. Their lives stretched from the workshop of a Fredericksburg gunsmith to the modern streets of Washington, from hand-fitted locks and firearms to cameras capable of preserving tens of thousands of faces. They were mechanics and artists, craftsmen and businesspeople, Virginians and Washingtonians. They knew war, migration, invention, ambition, family partnership, sudden death, and perseverance. Above all, they left faces.

Thousands of men, women, and children who entered the Bell galleries survive in photographs long after their own names have been forgotten. Behind those portraits stands the history of one American family, beginning with a Revolutionary veteran and his pension-seeking widow, passing through a Fredericksburg gunsmith and his photographer sons, reaching its greatest prominence under Charles Milton Bell, and continuing through Annie Colley Bell's determined stewardship until the studio left the family's hands in 1910. The business was sold. The faces remained.