The famous-photograph tests: pageant, flood, implosion — and one borrowed tornado

1909–2005 — each image attributed only where its record names a maker

The discipline is the finding: The tests are run in the open. The 1909 celebration. The Historical Pageant and Fourth of July Celebration of 1909 — the Hotel Mishawaka's opening, the pageant in Lincoln Park before six to ten thousand people, the week's crowds counted at every step in the banked events record — was the most photographed week of the city's first century, and photographs of it circulate through the city's collections; no record reached names the maker of any of them. The floods. The St. Joseph River's floods are among the most reproduced Mishawaka subjects of all; the flood photographs in the records reached carry no maker's name. The implosion. On 17 June 2000 at 8 a.m., an estimated six thousand people watched five large vacant brick buildings of the Ball Band works come down in about thirty seconds on five thousand sticks of dynamite — a morning made to be photographed, covered by every newsroom in the region and by hundreds of amateur cameras; the published account preserved with the Ball Band record names no photographer, and the day's images print here as anonymous, as they stand in the record. (The historical marker that now tells the works' story was itself photographed on 2 April 2013 for its marker database entry — a photograph of the telling, not of the day.) The displayed photograph. The Heritage Room of the public library still displays the photograph of the town's recruits of May 1917 marching from the 1914 Church Street library to the depot — the city's most deliberately kept photograph — and its maker is unnamed in the library's record. The newspaper pictures. The TribuneAgainst that whole field of anonymity stands one famous photograph with a name on it, and it is not a Mishawaka picture. On Palm Sunday, 11 April 1965, the Elkhart Truth's Paul Huffman photographed the twin funnels south of Dunlap as the storm destroyed the Midway Trailer Park, killing fourteen; the picture became the outbreak's famous image. It belongs to this fragment only at boundary strength: the funnels were in Elkhart County, the camera was an Elkhart paper's, and Huffman's documented Mishawaka tie is his Mishawaka Times job in advertising and circulation. The most famous photograph ever attached to this city's name in a caption was made by a man on another city's staff, of another town's storm. Mishawaka's own iconic images — the pageant, the floods, the falling Ball Band — stand in the record without makers' names, and this fragment prints them so rather than borrow them one.

Sources:

1. Cross-reference: Events Calendar — the 1909 Historical Pageant and Fourth of July Celebration (the Hotel Mishawaka opening; the pageant crowds of six to ten thousand; the Chamber's hundred-thousand-visitor estimate; no photographer named); the Palm Sunday 1965 account (Huffman's twin funnels south of Dunlap; the Midway Trailer Park deaths; Huffman's Mishawaka Times advertising and circulation work, per the Elkhart Public Library's account); the 2001 Merrifield Park fireworks photograph (maker unnamed).
2. Cross-reference: Ball Band — the controlled implosion of 17 June 2000 (five buildings; about six thousand spectators; five thousand sticks of dynamite; down in about thirty seconds); no photographer named in the account.
3. Cross-reference: Libraries — the Heritage Room's display of the May 1917 recruits photograph; maker unnamed in the library's record.
4. Cross-reference: Fire & Public Safety — the 2005 Central Park fish-ladder rescue photograph (Lt. Brian Costa); maker unnamed in the record.
5. Historical Marker Database (HMdb) — the Ball Band marker entry; marker photographed 2 April 2013.