Sixth plate ambrotype in a hanging wall frame. (Wear to plate near mat opening; surface wear to frame.) A seated portrait of a well-dressed, aged woman with distinctive facial features, identified inside case as "Sarah Wife of Great Uncle Thomas Dowd Cherokee from Cartersville 1859." 

The town of Cartersville is in Bartow County, which is located in northwest Georgia. Thomas Dowd may have escaped the "Trail of Tears" of the Cherokee in the early 1830s and settled on private lands in northwest Georgia. Although a large number of Cherokee were forced west to Oklahoma, groups were allowed to remain in the east who lived on private lands and not tribal lands. By this time, the Cherokee became quite assimilated with the lifestyle of the white residents as this 1859 photograph indicates.