oldcigarstoreindians.com ::: Mark Goldman's Collection of Cigar Store Indians

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Cigar Store Indians as seen in Cigar Magazine

IT'S NOT A JOB THAT SOUNDS ALL THAT ATTRACTIVE:
By Evan Schuman

The New York City loft of antinque collector and tobacconist Mark Goldman is now home to this motley crew of cigar store figures.

Stand motionless and guard a cigar store for 150 years and never light up. Your job is to alert those who can't read, or speak English, that they have found the tobacco merchant they seek, and you must endure the snow, sleet, rain, and sun (but, unlike the mail carrier, you are rarely applauded for your efforts). You remain stoic as people punch you in the nose and kick you in the shins.

It gets worse. Once upon a time, there were hundreds of thousands of you, protecting cigar shops in many countries. When wars came, your owners either chopped up most of your brethren for fire and fuel, or they melted down your metal cousins to make weapons. Today, you are among a very small and elite group for which people bid as much as a half-million dollars for you to stand sentry over their cigars.

Yes, the cigar store Indian certainly has seen his fortune change since his extreme popularity in the mid- to late 1800s.

This eight-and-a-half-foot chief with base, carved by William DeMuth, cost $175, new, in 1870.

Collectors will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for pieces they believe are authentically from the nineteenth century, despite the fact that craftspeople today are knocking out virtual carbon copies for as little as $600. So why buy the original, then? Because collectors aren't buying just six feet of wood, or metal: They are getting as close as they can to buying a part of tobacco history. They want to own that impassive figure who was around when buying cigars was noble and a matter of pride.

Note the sailor (far left) raising his arm to symbolize a tavern. The zinc pageboy, clutching a cigar bundle (third from left), was created by William DeMuth, c. 1875. Gamrinus (fifth from left) advertised a hofbrau house or a brewery.

Chic Kramer of Indianapolis is one of those collectors, but he is also a modern-day cigar store Indian manufacturer. "People absolutely want to own that piece of history, but it's not just the statue," Kramer asserts. "The original pieces generally tell a story, detailing where the statue was made and the various places it stood guard." Thus, in addition to the actual figures themselves, photos of Indian statues in their original locations are also prized by collectors.

Kramer may be right. Cigar store Indian statues have become one of the most popular types of folk art purchased today, according to Nancy Druckman, who has served as the director of the American Folk Art Department at Sotheby's, one of the world's largest auction houses, for thirty years.

Druckman says there is something very humanistic about the statues, which intrigues collectors. "They're very evocative, old-fashioned pieces of Americana. They really unleash a whole lot of nostalgia and remembrances of times past."

She has also seen a general trend over the last ten years for any three-dimensional piece to attract a lot of auction interest. "The beauty of the carving and the integrity of the pieces," she says, are what make cigar store Indians particularly popular.

V-shaped headdresses, like the ones shown here, are characteristic in the statues made by New York-based carver John L. Cromwell.

Another collector, Mark Goldman of New York City, is a big fan of the era and owns one piece that he estimates is valued at more than $500,000. But his interest is less an infatuation with their history than it is an intrigue in the statues as symbols of American business marketing strength. Put another way, the cigar merchant sees the Indians as less Americana and more nineteenth-century Madison Avenue. "I'm in the tobacco business. What makes these pieces wonderful to me is that they are truly commercial," Goldman says. "They didn't start life as art items. They were made for someone to make a living off of. The true cigar store Indian was not meant to be decorative. That Indian that you put outside was your special personalized symbol."

But in the nineteenth century, a store had to rely more on marketing than on merchandise to set itself apart from the competition. "They simply didn't have that kind of vast variety" he says. "The product line inside the store generally did not differentiate itself, `I'm a discounter,' [or] `I'm a chandelier store.' They all had the same products."

But some tobacco shops were specialized and some had a broader array of offerings. The cigar store Indian statue was intended to signal a soup-to-nuts line of smoking products, per Goldman. "The one that had an Indian had all the smokers' needs filled: chewing tobacco, a box of pipe tobacco, a cut of chew," he elaborates. The Indian statue said it all, without taking up much space: "On a big city street corner, space is at a premium."

Dubbed "leaners," some Indians were carved resting an arm on a barrel, an oversized cigar, or a tree stump, as shown in this statue created by Thomas V. Brooks of New York.

Indeed, the statues' early existence in nineteenth-century America had less to do with current-day ideas of marketing than of simple store identification. With so many immigrants unable to speak English, these warrior images told passersby, "This store sells cigars," in the same way that the striped pole said that another merchant cut hair, and a mortar and pestle revealed the pharmacist's storefront. These Indian statues even communicated various merchant types: An Indian holding a cup of sugar would symbolize a general store, whereas one wearing a kilt of tobacco leaves and clenching a fistful of cigars announced a smokeshop.

As the years progressed, the statues were sometimes repainted to change their purpose. For example, collector Goldman once saw an Indian statue holding a box of candy. When the paint was chipped away, Goldman discovered that it was originally a cigar box.

Unlike the barbershop pole, though, the Indian statues were not identical and they were never intended to be. Shop owners would contract with the artists, who would take instructions and carve unique six-foot-tall calling cards.

It's also important to note that the genre of cigar store Indians is not actually limited to statues of Native Americans. Although the image of the Native American was quite popular - with a range of chiefs, squaws, and braves, often headdressed and armed - as the statues became more commonplace, variations were created, portraying such characters as Uncle Sam, clowns, and a popular period character known as Punch.

Trivia note: Cigar store Indians are classified as American folk art, which is important to know if you're looking to bid on one at an auction house. But they are mistakenly classified as such, despite the fact that most of the Indians are clearly not folk art.

Folk art by definition is traditional, anonymous art created usually by untrained artists. However, "Cigar store figures have become known as folk sculpture, but that is something of a misnomer because clearly they were created by trained artists," says Henry Joyce, chief curator of the Shelburne Museum, a Vermont museum well-known for its cigar store Indian collection. Today, Shelburne has about forty cigar store figures on display, according to Joyce.

The detail-oriented artistry of these pieces is what fascinates collector Kramer. "These carvers, they didn't just make signposts. They went all out and made lifelike replicas of a human being," he says.

For years, Kramer was baffled by how the original carvers were able to get so detailed and precise in their creations. After all, Kramer had been trained to carve wood statues out of one giant piece of wood, which places a physical limit on some detail efforts. But he then discovered that the tactic of carving a wood statue out of a single piece of wood is actually a very new phenomenon, starting only in the 1940s with the invention of the chainsaw. That piece of equipment revolutionized the carving industry (as well as the teen horror-movie market, but I digress).

Another Thomas Brooks creation - this one not leaning, but instead standing tall and bearing a stoic countenance, as well as a box of cigars.

When these original statues were created in the 1800s, the carvers worked in elaborate workshops filled with specialists. "The shops had people specializing in different parts of the body. They assigned each artist one part of the body," Kramer said. "These pieces are truly pieces of Americana," collector Goldman adds. "You can buy a bottle of Cabernet and it's a commodity. You can't do that with these Indian statues, as they are unique."

Goldman sees a world of difference between current Indian statue carvings and the originals. "The new ones are the same things that are knocked out again and again," he says. "In 1880, it may have taken the guy a week to carve it."

Most of these artists had originally been trained as ship carvers. Until the 1850s, East Coast port cities including Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston kept the ship carvers quite busy, according to Artists in Wood, a well-regarded 1970 book on the topic by Frederick Fried. When the demand for boats declined, those craftsmen realized they had to find other work. And meticulously making Native American statues for cigar merchants was how many of these talented ship carvers survived.

For the tobacco merchant, the figure of a Native American symbolized the history of tobacco - and what better way for a cigar merchant to welcome customers than with this romanticized version of history, a statue of the Native American in traditional garb graciously presenting his tobacco to the peoples of the world? Reportedly brought to Europe by the returning crew of Christopher Columbus, tobacco became wildly popular.

As tobacco shops began popping up throughout Europe, the merchants wanted to use symbols that would represent the Native Americans from whom they received this tobacco. However, a small number of statues credited to seventeenth-century European carvers portray African people wearing headdresses and kilts made of tobacco leaves (it is speculated that the carvers mistakenly attributed tobacco to the Americans' slaves of African decent). The very few of these figures that remain are dubbed Virginians, paying tribute to the American state that Europeans associated with tobacco.

The European symbolism was not simply, "Indian statue means cigars." It was a more sophisticated marketing angle and it meant "American cigars and American tobacco." At that time, Portugal, France, and Canada also grew and sold tobacco, but, "...the English wanted to represent the country that the tobacco it was selling came from [originated]," Kramer states. As cigar stores made their way to the United States around the 1850s, artists often took care to be much more accurate in their renditions, hiring models for reference.

The Highland lass (foreground left) offering a cigar bundle was made by Samuel A. Robb of New York, an artist credited for carving more statues than any other carver at the time. James Campbell of Baltimore, Maryland is the carver of the large Punch (foreground right), a popular period character.

One of the better-known artists of that day was Julius Theodore Melchers. In a July 23, 1899 interview in the Detroit News Tribune, he detailed how he approached his statue-crafting assignments: "When I came to Detroit in 1852, a few rudely carved and badly painted signs were found at the stores. The first work I did in Detroit was to carve a little chief, about five feet high," he said. Reflecting the attitudes of the day, he explained, "I hired an Indian to put on a lot of savage finery and pose as a model. It was no trouble getting an Indian model in those days," he elaborated. "He would pose all day, if I wanted him to. When I got the image done, I received $55 for it."

In that same interview, Melchers weighed in on the controversy of the gradual disappearance of the cigar store Indian from American sidewalks. Typically, blame for their disappearance is assigned to a series of anti-sidewalk-obstruction laws, starting around 1911, which is how Chic Kramer understands it. Those laws, that theory goes, forced the Indians off the sidewalks and into the stores themselves, where much of their value was irrelevant. Another popular theory is that the statues started vanishing in the early twentieth century, as electric signs made them obsolete.

But when Melchers was interviewed in 1899 - a dozen years before those sidewalk laws became mandatory - he tried to explain the disappearances, which obviously had already started happening. Asked to explain the statues' rapidly shrinking numbers, he blamed American business: "I think that Yankee thrift has done it. The American merchants are pretty shrewd businessmen and there is a demand for space on sidewalks for fruit and newsstands and many other kinds of business. The [merchants] pay good rent for the space and there is no room for the signs."

To be absolutely precise about it, neither the shrewd businessperson nor the sidewalk bureaucrats caused the death of these statues. At best, they sharply curtailed their use and made it unprofitable to build new ones. What really killed the vast majority of these statues were wars. More precisely, the metal and wood drives held to aid those wars.

The two most popular materials used for the crafting of cigar store Indian statues were wood and metal (particularly nickel and zinc). "There were literally hundreds of thousands of the statues made in the nineteenth century, but the wood ones were destroyed for material and they melted down the zinc ones, too," Kramer says.

However, there weren't nearly as many zinc Indians as there were wood ones. One reason for that was simply the cost. "The metal pieces were about forty percent more expensive to make," Goldman says. Given that the metal statues were identical and that the wood statues could be more easily individualized, that gave quite an edge to the wood creations.

The cast-hollow metal statues, to their credit, were far more durable than wood, though. "There was the continuity of it," affirms Goldman. "If you didn't drop it, they'd last forever. They wonderfully withstood the elements, other than needing new paint."

According to Sotheby's Nancy Druckman, zinc cigar store Indians, though rarer on the auction circuit, are less popular than those carved from wood. One reason for this is that the metal figures are cast pieces, made with molds and thus lack the individualized style possessed by the wood carvings. "They were manufactured from molds so they're pretty much cookie-cutter images," Druckman explains. "They don't have quite the same tactile quality," she said, which is important in an antique. Buyers want the piece to feel as it felt when it was originally used.

The look is important, too. "We are talking about visual art here," she said. The use of cold, impersonalized metal negatively impacted the warmth of the piece, she believes.

Druckman said there was another very practical reason metal cigar store Indians are usually strangers to the auction bidder: They are often extremely tall, typically seven feet or higher. Saying that she didn't know why they were made that much taller, Druckman pointed out the logistical challenges of an apartment-dwelling collector, or someone living in a small house, to display such a piece.

In many ways, these stoic warrior statues proved to be the ideal cigar symbol. They were literally born of the seafaring ships that first brought tobacco from America to Europe. Their creators were trained at making those ships, and their actual bodies were parts of the long-dried wood intended for use in building those ships.

Today, though, their few remaining numbers are a saddened and cynical lot. After their many decades of service and neglect, today they find themselves mostly being abused at auction. Like cheap soap-opera characters, no one truly knows who their "fathers" are, resulting in rumors about their origins. They are bought and sold, their homes now being determined based not on their service but on the whims of the market. The only job they were trained to do - offer cigars to the passerby - is often denied to them in the modern day.

Stoic to the end, the cigar store Indian stands tall and says there is nothing he won't do. But, for heaven's sake, can someone at least let him have a few puffs?

Copyright 2004 • Reprinted courtesy of Cigar Magazine we are always looking to purchase quality antique indians • email us for a free appraisal of your antique indians • we are always looking to purchase quality antique indians • email us for a free appraisal of your antique indians

Cigar Store Indian Collection of Mark Goldman

we are always looking to purchase quality antique indians • email us for a free appraisal of your antique indians