Sturgess & Taylor

1859                Rooms East Temple Street, Great Salt Lake City, Utah

Sturgess & Taylor (C. Sturgess & G. J. Taylor) were recorded in two advertisements ad one announcement in The Mountaineer (Great Salt Lake City, Utah).  The first advertisement ran from September 3 to 10, 1859.  New Daguerrean Gallery!  Messrs. Sturgess & Taylor Have Just Opened a Daguerrean Gallery, at the old stand, just south of Godby’s Drug Store, where they are prepared to take daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, M-leanotypes, &c., in the latest and most approved style.

Mr. Sturgess has for a number of years past been engaged in some of the first galleries of London, New York, St. Louis and elsewhere, and is thoroughly acquainted with all the late improvements in the art.  Having on hand a well selected assortment of Cases, Plates, and Fittings, to business, they will be able to obtain a liberal share of public patronage.

Pictures taken in various styles, suitable for including in letters. C. Sturgess.  G. J. Taylor.

The second advertisement ran from September 24 to November 19, 1859.  Another Great Battle!!  Terrific Slaughter!  Thousands of bereaved and disconsolate widows and orphans mourning in the bitterness of despair, and refusing to be comforted simply because they have neglected, in the season thereof, to provide themselves with Life-Like Likenesses, Such as are taken by Sturgess And Taylor, East Temple Street, where tumultuous multitudes of enchanted patrons throng daily to receive those magnificent Xylographic Pictures, which they still continue to present to their numerous friends, at the ridiculously Low Prices which their immense amount of Stock has enabled them to introduce—where Pictures are copied, cleaned and repaired—where likenesses are taken in various styles for inclosing in letters, and where Jewelry and Cases of almost every description are kept constantly on hand!  Go and examine their work, and you will feel to exclaim with the Queen of Sheba, “The half has not been told me.”

Sturgess & Taylor, East Temple Street, Just South of the Salt Lake House.

The announcement appeared on October 8, 1859, Vol. 2, No. 1, P. 2.

Desert State Fair.  The fourth annual exhibition in connection with the Desert Agricultural and Manufacturing Society was held in the Social Hal, in this city, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday last…Mr. Cannon, the Daguerrean artist, has at last powerful rivals in Messrs. Sturgess & Taylor.  This last firm took the first prize.  The specimens produced by both houses were excellent, and showed good pictures….

Sturgess & Taylor are not recorded in other photographic directories as being active in Salt Lake City, Utah.  It is likely that the two entries for Charles Sturgess in Craig’s Daguerreian Registry are the same person based on the information in the second paragraph of the first advertisement.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.