Photo of New York fire engine horses courtesy the Library of Congress

Sound the alarm, DCist historians: The DC Fire Department needs your help.

John Kelly does, anyway. In his Washington column today, Kelly can’t answer a question put to him by DC fire academy instructor Lt. T. “Cosgrove” Jones, so instead, he pays the question forward. Apparently, DCFD’s lost a monument.

Back before fire engines had engines, they were carts pulled by horses. More than 200 of them operated in DC’s fire department, until they lost their jobs to the motor vehicle. (Check out an ancient video recording the District’s equine ember patrol in action.) When the last of DC’s fire horses, Tom, was put out to pasture, a memorial was created, so that District citizens would never forget the brave contributions of Tom and his peers.

Then the District forgot where that monument is. Lt. Jones is on a quest to find it:

The fire academy is on the other side of Interstate 295 from the Blue Plains water treatment plant, and it tantalizes Lt. Jones to think that Tom’s monument might be somewhere nearby, overgrown by creepers or buried under backfill. He has a photo that shows the 1937 dedication. There’s a ribbon of water in the distance and beyond that a strip of land. Could that be the Virginia shore and was Tom laid to rest near the Potomac? Or is the water Oxon Creek, which would put Tom in what is now woods south of D.C. Village?

Got a relative on the force? Or relatives with relatives who were on the force way back when? Know a serious equestrian? Ask around and help restore this monument to mere relative obscurity!