"Lay still old girl, FEMA's on the way."
1870s dead horse photo sparks mystery, By ROBERT IMRIE, Associated Press Writer
WAUSAU, Wis. - It's a cliche, beating a dead horse, but it sure fits what's happening in a southeast Wisconsin city trying to unravel the mystery of an 1870s photo of a stovepipe-hatted man sitting on a dead horse in the middle of a dusty, deserted street.
The black-and-white picture taken in Sheboygan between 1876 and 1884 has sparked curiosity, speculation and jokes from people nationwide after a newspaper published a 2007 calendar with the scene. A response from readers prompted the newspaper to report about it. From there, it took off on the Internet and blogging.
"This thing has gotten more mileage than you can shake a stick at," said Scott Prescher, who has a copy of the dead-horse photo in his Sheboygan restaurant.
"It is just a funny picture," Prescher said, laughing. "He is sitting on there with a top hat like he had somewhere special to go and his horse just croaked in the middle of the road."
No one knows who the gentleman is, exactly what year the picture was taken or the circumstances surrounding it, said Beth Dipple, director of the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center, which has had the picture in its collection for at least 20 years.
"It is a great picture and every time I see it I just laugh," she said. "But this time the novelty is everybody else is seeing it for the first time. The whole world is seeing it now."
After writing two stories about the picture, The Sheboygan Press has received more than 50 calls and e-mails about it, including from a California genealogist.
Some of their ideas for what the picture depicts include the thoughtful — it was staged for a political campaign perhaps related to sanitation issues — to the bizarre — it was a way to help relieve the horse of "excess flatulence."
Dibble said the newspaper published the photo on Aug. 20, 1974, too, but mainly to focus attention on the nearby buildings. The caption said the man who provided the photo to the newspaper received it from a friend who had no idea about its origin.
A Web site that focuses on "pop, politics, sex and so on" sponsored a contest for readers to write the best caption or anti-caption for the photo and about 100 were submitted, including this one: "Lay still old girl, FEMA's on the way."
A blogger for the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in Florida, included a link to the Press stories as part his daily fix of media industry news.
"I didn't realize there was so much going on with this thing," Dipple said Thursday. "This has all been in the last couple of weeks? They have been having fun obviously."
Dipple said about all that's known about the picture is it was taken at South Eighth Street and Indiana Avenue between 1876 and 1884 — based on the bridge over the Sheboygan River in the background and the lack of railroad tracks that were installed in 1884.
The city had laws on the books that required people to stay with their dead horses until they were picked up and disposed of, Dipple said.
"Who knows why somebody would take a picture of it," she said. "People had weird senses of humor then just like they do now. Or he was practicing using his new camera. I don't know. That is one of those things that I doubt we will ever know."
Bill Wangemann, who's been Sheboygan's unpaid city historian since being appointed to the job in 1986, said it's not unusual for old pictures to become mysteries because information about them doesn't get passed along.
He said he got a recent call from a woman who told him that her husband once had a glass plate of the picture — the technology used in 1870s to make pictures — but it broke and the envelope with it said only that the photo was a man on a dead horse.
Wangemann's seen other gag photos done from that era and thinks the dead horse is one, too.
"I always took it to be just somebody's weird idea of a joke," the 71-year-old historian said. "'Hey Joe, go out there and sit on that dead horse and I'll take your picture.' Maybe he was a friend of the photographer."
