Where did it come from? Where did it go?
Investigating one of Fort Worth's least important mysteries.
I’m obsessed with this photo. Are you obsessed with this photo? You should be. Let me tell you about it.
But first:
There’s a very good story from the Fort Worth Report this week about the past, present, and future of the Panther Island flood control project.
You should go read that before you read the rest of this post because they did genuinely good reporting, and I’m writing about a picture of a horse on a roof.
Anyway, the story reminded me of Fort Worth’s catastrophic 1949 flood, which was the original impetus for actually doing something about flooding along the Trinity. As historical events go, the flood is quite well-documented. You can watch archival clips of bedraggled residents carrying mattresses out of homes and pushing their dogs around in little boats on the flooded streets. Or you can go browse the public library’s collection of aerial photos. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s archives also offer extensive contemporary coverage with grim, apocalyptic banner headlines.
It was a bad time!
But the most enigmatic media artifact washed down to us by the currents of history is definitely that picture of a horse on roof somewhere northeast of the Montgomery Ward building.
Susan Sontag, in her book about photography that I never quite finished, has this to say about photos: “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality ... One can’t possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images … one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.”
But she is wrong! I don’t feel like I possess this horse. In fact, this horse eludes my grasp.
What do we know about it? Not much. This is the full description of the photograph:
Flooded homes near downtown Fort Worth in the 1949 Flood of the Clear Fork of the Trinity River. Montgomery Wards department store is seen in the distance. A horse is on one of the rooftops.
I know I’m asking a lot from a photo caption, but really this leaves a lot to the imagination. We do know the name of the photographer, though! According to UNT’s Portal to Texas History, someone named Hillis Miessner took the picture.
That’s something! But who was Hillis Miessner?
I found references to a Hillis Miessner who lived in Fort Worth back in the 40s and 50s. There’s a marriage announcement in 1948. He was also an important member of Hope Lutheran Church, a congregation that once met in a building on N. Littlejohn Ave.
Perhaps this is the same man who took the photo?
Many unanswered questions remain, though. Did the horse belong to Miessner? Did he live nearby? Was he up on top of his roof, awaiting rescue? If not, why was he there? Was he on a boat, looking for survivors? Did Miessner rescue the horse? Or was he simply bearing witness to the animal’s quest for survival? (Sontag reminds us that: “Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention … The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who records cannot intervene.”)
This is what haunts me about the photo — the indeterminacy of it all. We simply have no way to know more about the before and after, why the horse was there and what happened to it.
Miessner may have known more. Unfortunately, I also found his obituary. He died in 2013. I’m ten years too late to ask him.