[Nashville, Tennessee: Market Street Scene of Courthouse Square]

In the 1850s, the vast majority of American photographs were portrait daguerreotypes (one-of-a-kind photographs on silver-plated sheets of copper.) Paper photography, already widely used in Europe by mid-decade, was slow to catch on here, and portraiture remained the dominant subject. These views of Nashville and Lexington—among the earliest photographs of either city—are rare depictions of urban life before the Civil War outside the long-established cities of the East Coast.