looking for Lawrence

  A few days ago, Rob Gavel asked neighbors on the Historic Stockade Yahoo! Group mailing list if anyone had a “a full-body image of Lawrence” that could be used in a project for the Stockade Association.  To my surprise, as I searched my online and computer photo collections, I did not have a simple full-body portrait of our beloved Lawrence the Indian.   The Stockade’s monument to Lawrence, or his traffic circle, appears in many of my photographs and webposts, but Lawrence is customarily just part of the tableau or background for one neighborhood event or another (e.g., the Valentine flamingo visit, our Christmas tree, Stockade-a-thon, or the Outdoor Art Show).

  Rob’s request made me realize that I need to take a closer look at Lawrence himself.  Yesterday afternoon, I did just that, on a sunny, mid-October Saturday (and also on Friday, October 16).  Below you will find a few portraits of Lawrence the Indian, an icon of our Stockade neighborhood, along with some facts about him and his statue.  [As always, click on a photo for a larger version.]

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- update (Feb. 2, 2010): the above pose is used for the new Stockade Gateway Banner, which was the project Rob Gavel had in mind when he sought Lawrence images –

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“Lawrence” was among the Native Mohawks who encouraged the Dutch to resettle the village of Schenectady after a 1690 attack, in which French-Canadian and Indian marauders burned the stockaded village to the ground and massacred most of its inhabitants. (see the Stockade Association history page) The “I Spy” website of the Mohawk Valley Library System has this to say about the Stockade monument known as Lawrence the Indian:

At the junction of Front, Green and North Ferry Streets, is the Indian monument which marks the northeastern extremity and blockhouse of Queen’s Fort that was built by 1705, after the massacre. The statue was placed at that site in 1887 and became known as “Lawrence the Indian.” Lawrence was named after the Christian Mohawk who was a great friend to the early settlers and the most persistent of the trackers of the retreating French and Indians after the 1690 raid.

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As discussed in February 2008 at my f/k/a weblog, our statue of Lawrence the Indian “was originally a carving done by wood carver Samuel Anderson Robb about 1860 for William Demuth, who was the leading cigar store Indian peddler. Demuth published a catalog of his wares and in 1872 Lawrence is listed as ‘No. 53 Indian Chief.’  In 1873, the J.L.Mott Iron Works purchased the design and listed him for $500 in their catalog of statuary. The Schenectady statue was purchased in 1887.” [See “Fargo, North Dakota: The Indian Statue,” put together by the Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota State University.]

In addition to our Lawrence the Indian, the J.L. Mott Iron Works model “#53 Indian Chief” statuary has had quite a few identities; the names and legends include:

• Chief Hopocan in New Portage Park, at the intersection of Norton Avenue and Wooster Road, in Barberton, Ohio.
• Tecumseh at the J. Fitzhugh Thornton Memorial, Thornton Triangle park in Cincinnati, Ohio
• Hiawatha at the Forest Glen Annex to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Dewitt Circle & Linden Lane, in the Washington DC suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland [not Bethesda, MD, as stated in the Queen City Survey weblog, where you can find a discussion and a photo of Hiawatha].  Two photos of our Lawrence are standing in for his clone Hiawatha at Marv Solberg’s informative and comprehensive dcMemorials.com website.
• the Kisco Indian, at the Gorham Fountain, Mt. Kisco, New York, in Westchester County.  According to a webpage from the Smithsonian Art Museum inventory catalog, “the sculpture “was first exhibited at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. . . .The work was featured in Ripley’s Believe or Not in 1968.”  Originally part of a water fountain and watering trough for horses, it was also meant to be “as symbol of the Prohibition Party.”
• a Cherokee named Sequoia, in Calhoun, Georgia
• an Indian unidentified by name or tribe in Fargo, North Dakota.

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The other versions of Mott’s “#53 Indian Chief” may look like our Lawrence, but none of them is nestled among the sights and people at the heart of the Schenectady Stockade.

follow-up (May 3, 2012): See our posting “Lawrence goes walkabout” (May 2, 2012), which describes — with many photos – Lawrence’s brief removal, after 125 years, so that his pedestal can be restored.