>>> We recently partnered with the Central Ohio Fire Museum.

So we're digitizing a lot of the archival materials that they have over at the museum.

And one box they came across was a series of photos, glass slides actually featuring a mounted police unit.

And doing some research, we actually learned that it's the very first mounted police unit in the city of Columbus, dated 1922.

The unit was sponsored by the Columbus Automobile Club.

Ironically, 1908, the Model T is introduced.

By 1922 people are driving their cars everywhere.

Traffic's getting a little trickier and horses were actually still the best way to control the traffic so they could see further.

They were up higher and it was a little easier to kind of navigate between the cars if we did have a little bit of a traffic jam.

So they sponsored this mounted unit.

They facilitated the purchase by getting some other donors on board.

Those donors in turn, were actually allowed to name the horses.

So, for example, Horse George Karb was named for former Columbus Mayor George Karb.

All of the horses had pretty interesting names, to say the least.

A lot of CEOs of local companies, that kind of thing.

But we were able to identify the names of the 15 horses, the names of all of the officers that were in the first unit.

We weren't able to identify each individual within each photo, with one exception.

We have this photo here that's actually, we think, the unit commander, Corporal Floyd Smith.

And we were able to tell that because he has the two Stripe Chevron on his arm, which indicates a rank of corporal, nobody else in the unit would have had that rank.

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Ohio Snapshots in Time is produced by WOSU Public Media in partnership with the staff of the Columbus Metropolitan Library.