Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 20, Number 2, Fall, 2008 Page: 58 of 68
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Quentin McGown (text and captions),
Historic Photographs of Fort Worth
(Nashville: Turner Publishing Company,
2007, 206 pp., $39.95)
Books that showcase historic photographs
are easy for history devotees to love.This is particularly
true when the photographs are generously
reproduced in a large-format volume with
the images laid out one to a page or even spread
across two pages so that they can be examined in
detail.
Turner Publishing has aggressively published
such a series of books, most devoted to historic
images of American cities, producing over 120
titles within the past three years. FortWorth joins
Austin, Dallas, Houston, Corpus Christi, El Paso,
and San Antonio among the communities represented
by this series. Although these are "formula
books" with a standard 10" x 10" format and
standard layout schemes, they are well designed
and printed and showcase the photographs in a
handsome format.
In preparing a volume in the "Historic
Photos of .. ." series, Turner Publishing typically
sends a company representative to the community,
and that person selects historic photographs
from the area's repositories. Turner then hires a
local historian to write the text and captions.
This can work well, or it can result in a selection
that overemphasizes some subjects or time periods
and underemphasizes others.
Thankfully, Quentin McGown edited
Turner's selections for Fort Worth, discarding
some images that were not of the city or had
been used many times previously, in favor of a
group of more diverse and less often seen photographs.
(Michael V. Hazel employed a similar
process for the Dallas book, published in 2006
and reviewed in the spring 2007 issue of
Legacies.) The result is a pleasing volume that features
pictures from the 1870s through the 1960s,
arranged by time period and then roughly by
subject or visual interest. Most of the photographs
in the FortWorth volume come from the
collections of the University of Texas atArlington Libraries Special Collections or the
Fort Worth Public Library. McGown also added
a handful of images from private collections,
demonstrating that there is a rich lode of Fort
Worth photographs still in private hands.
Among the thoughtful pairings are two
views of the 1876 (post-fire) courthouse and the
building as it appeared in 1882. Questions have
lingered over whether the 1882 building was a
new building or an expanded version of the old
one and, with the photographs side-by-side,
viewers can clearly see the relationship between
the two structures. Another pleasing pairing
shows the view of the central business district
from the Jennings Avenue viaduct made about
twenty-five years apart. Humorous images, such
as the one of Fort Worth firefighters holding a
pair of catfish weighing 67 and 68 pounds that
were "rescued" from the trunk of a stolen car
submerged in Lake Benbrook, are also sprinkled
throughout the volume.
McGown does a good job of examining an
image and creating a caption that weaves a story
about Fort Worth's business or community life56 LEGACIES Fall 2008
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Dallas Heritage Village. Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 20, Number 2, Fall, 2008, periodical, 2008; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth46806/m1/58/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Historical Society.