John Robertson Abel Jr. & Family Portrait by J.B. Beugler of Dayton Tennessee

While rummaging through some of your old family photo collections, you may have come across some old sepia toned portraits mounted on rigid cardboard. These are known as cabinet cards, They were very popular in the late 1800’s. These cards were first introduced around 1860 and their peak popularity was between 1870-1895. The decline of the cabinet cards began around 1900 when snapshot and personal photography started appearing bringing unmounted paper prints and the scrapbook albums replacing them. Little is known about this particular photographer, J.B. Beugler, other than he must have been a popular photographer in Dayton because his work appears quiet often. The feature photo above is a scan of one of the cabinet cards from 1895 out of the Abel Family Collection. The family posing is John Robertson Abel, Jr. and his wife, Mary Elizabeth (Hickman) Abel along with their children (L-R) Fred, Albert, James and Alex. John Abel Jr. was the grandson of Cain Abel who settled here in 1807, before Dayton or Smith’s Crossroads were established. Many Abel family descendants still reside in Dayton today.