C.M. Bell Studio

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C.M. Bell Studio Historic repository containing the photography (1862-1910) of Charles Milton Bell and Bell & Bros.

10/18/2026

In the early 1890s, C. M. Bell photographed Washington hotelier Caleb C. Willard with a young girl we believe may have been his granddaughter, Alice Willard Boyd.
One glass negative shows wealth and position. Another preserves something more enduring, affection between generations.

10/08/2026

Four portraits. One name. One mystery.
C. M. Bell photographed this young woman as “Miss J. Gale.” Could she have been connected to Minna K. Gale, the celebrated actress who performed with Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett?
For now, her identity remains uncertain.

10/06/2026

Henry B. Payne sat for C. M. Bell’s camera in the Gilded Age, a senator whose election raised familiar questions about money and political influence.
The fortunes have changed. The question hasn’t.
“What’s past is prologue.”

10/01/2026

Isabella Beecher Ho**er, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was an abolitionist, suffragist, and fierce advocate for married women’s property rights. She even broke with her own family during the notorious Beecher-Tilton scandal.

09/29/2026

A striking C. M. Bell portrait of “R. A. Sealey,” probably the Rev. Reuben A. Sealy of Barbados, an A.M.E. minister tied to British Guiana and the wider Caribbean mission field. His portrait also reveals the remarkable diversity before Bell’s camera during the hardening age of Jim Crow. 🇺🇸

09/28/2026

In 1901, Miss L. Zehnder sat before C. M. Bell’s camera in Washington, D.C. More than a century later, Bell’s great-grandson, Colley Bell, is using digital technology to help recover the stories hidden within 25,000 glass negatives.

09/22/2026

Three C. M. Bell portraits may have reunited a Washington family after more than a century: Virginia Hammer and her daughters, Mary and Eliza. The older negative carries a conflicting name, but research points strongly to Virginia. The faces survived, even when the family story nearly disappeared. ❤️ and day

09/21/2026

Warren Stiles Young spent more than three decades inside the White House, serving eight presidents from James A. Garfield to Woodrow Wilson. The C. M. Bell Studio preserved the face of a man who quietly witnessed the presidency change across the Gilded Age and into the modern era.

09/13/2026

Long before the White House, Edith Bolling sat for the camera of C. M. Bell beside her mother, Sallie White Bolling. Decades later, Edith would marry Woodrow Wilson and, after his devastating 1919 stroke, become the gatekeeper to an incapacitated presidency during the bitter fight over Versailles and the League of Nations. She called it her “stewardship.” Critics called her something more.

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465 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington D.C., DC
20001

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