MOUNT VERNON — Once a month, we feature a pair of vintage cabinet card photographs taken in Knox County which do not have names identifying the people in the pictures. They were all taken by photographers who had studios in Mount Vernon.
Cabinet cards were a popular format for sharing photos in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
The picture at the top of this story brings us a man with a grand walrus mustache, in a photo taken at the Star & Crescent Art Gallery on West Gambier Street. Several other photos we’ve examined in this series came from this short-lived gallery, which appears to have been in business for only a few years in the 1890s.
The photograph here shows a formidable woman in a high-collared dress. It was taken by a photographer named Ward, who was one of the many residents of the studio at the corner of Main and Vine Streets in Mount Vernon, though exactly when he was there is uncertain.
Please share this column around, in hopes that we could identify these people and return the cabinet cards to their families.
