July 11--Among the seven bulleted items underneath the "Why Choose Us?" tab on the Bon Ton Photo Studio's website is this:
"Bon Ton Photo Studio prides itself on its history. That is why your original portrait files are NEVER destroyed. They are always available for reprints."
And for more than 80 years, that was true -- until Friday, when a fire gutted the 141-year-old building in downtown Cambridge, about 80 miles east of Columbus.
As firefighters from three departments struggled to douse the flames spewing from the third floor of the Wheeling Avenue building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, thousands of gallons of water filled the basement below.
There, in boxes and boxes filling shelf upon shelf, were those original portrait files, the product of photo shoots of every client who had passed through the door since the studio opened in 1927.
Kimberly Harra-Carter, 26, owned not only Bon Ton Photo Studio but also the building, including the four apartments on the top floor -- one of which she shared with her husband, Brandon, and their Brittany spaniel, Luke.
It was a total loss. Harra-Carter escaped with the clothes on her back and two laptop computers she managed to grab as she fled the burning building. The laptops had digital archives of the past couple of years' worth of photo shoots stored on them.
"I'm more upset about the history than anything," she said. "It kills me. Cameras can be replaced. But the history ... we prided ourselves on being able to say, 'We have your grandparents' wedding photo.' The only family photo of my grandparents and all nine siblings was in that basement."
"That's terrible," Cambridge resident Rick Booth said when he learned that Bon Ton's archives were destroyed. Among the photos lost was his senior picture from 1973, as well as his father's senior picture from 1947. "I'd guess just about every yearbook photo for decades was a Bon Ton photo. They were the big studio."
Harra-Carter said that every photo shoot had its own pouch containing the client's contact information, information about the session and the negatives and proofs from the shoot. Separate card catalogues, filled with thousands of cards filed alphabetically by year, contained every client's name, date of the shoot and the corresponding pouch number.
"I don't know if they started at No. 1, but we had a session that morning with a family, and we were on pouch 39,000 and some," she said. "We had a little bit of everything down there. I was even told -- and it's pure rumor, I never saw it -- that one of the earlier photographers shot an Elvis concert somewhere in the area and those negatives were down there."
A day after the fire, Harra-Carter returned to see the damage. She spotted a wooden sign, slightly damaged, that had hung outside the business since at least the 1950s, she said.
"Bon Ton's not going away," she said. "We'll rebuild, and we're going to put this sign up again when we do."
@ewlyttle
Copyright 2013 - The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
