In 1880, the New York City area was the cigar-making capital of the United States. For centuries, pipe tobacco and snuff had been the most sought-after commodities throughout the Atlantic World. Beginning in the 1840s, the arrival of skilled cigar-makers from Europe, particularly German immigrants, gave rise to a robust cigar-manufacturing industry in the Americas.

Small shops with fewer than three skilled workers—usually men who rolled cigars by hand—initially dominated the trade. The introduction of cigar molds in the 1870s simplified the process and subdivided production, creating opportunities for unskilled laborers and women. By the turn of the twentieth century, cigar factories with fifty or more workers became common, as did the practice of outsourcing piecework to immigrant and working-class families living overcrowded, factory-owned tenement buildings.

Independent tobacconist shops like those owned by Brooklyn’s Aschner family provided the public with tobacco products and accessories. German immigrant Abraham Aschner opened his first cigar shop in the 1880s and was later succeeded in the business by his sons. A. Aschner’s Sons eventually operated six cigar emporiums throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. To attract customers, the Aschners placed show figures of American Indians prominently in front of their stores.

“Did anyone ever suspect that Indians still lurked on Brooklyn Heights?” Brooklyn Eagle Magazine writer Lillian Sabine posed this question in 1930 in a feature article about the seated Indian show figure now in the BHS collection. Sabine’s article honored the sculpture as a neighborhood landmark. Reading the article today, however, casual racism in comments like the one above one stick out sharply, evidence of a deep-seated racial bias in America towards American Indians, one borne from the long exploitative process of American expansion.

With his dignified, stoic appearance, BHS’s seated Indian sculpture is a classic representation of the “noble savage,” a popular literary hero figure who accepted his fate—extinction—with grace at the advance of modern civilization. In the 1800s, stereotypes like the “noble savage” perpetuated the idea that America’s indigenous communities were a “vanishing race,” their slow disappearance leaving settlers free to inherit the United States. This romantic narrative concealed the reality of the involuntary and violent displacement of American Indian communities from their homelands throughout the country’s history, including the Lenape, who for centuries called the region now known as Brooklyn, home. 

The Lenape were multiple, distinct, seminomadic communities who lived throughout western Long Island, New Jersey, southeastern New York, eastern Pennsylvania, and northern Delaware. In the 1630s, when European incursion began into what is today Brooklyn, settlers arranged land purchases with the Lenape, arrangements understood differently by the individuals involved. Subsequent conflicts led to warfare, and the introduction of European diseases like smallpox decimated Lenape communities. Those who survived eventually fled their ancestral homeland, which they called Lenapehoking.

Despite the fact that the reality was considerably more complex, by the mid-1800s, Brooklyn historian Gabriel Furman felt confident enough to write that the Lenape “are at this time totally extinct; not a single member of that ill-rated race is now in existence.” The Lenape were not extinct. They were displaced, surviving members forced farther West from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Today, the descendants of the dispossessed Lenape live as far afield as Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario, Canada, but their connection to Lenapehoking remains strong.

The physical reminders of American Indians living in Brooklyn have largely been swallowed today by the European settlements that grew on top of the “villages, paths, and ponds” of the Lenape. That difficult history should be acknowledged, as should the significant role that artifacts like this sculpture played in erasing the history of American Indian displacement and oppression.

BHS’s seated Indian show figure looked out onto Brooklyn Heights from the tobacco shop at the corner of Montague and Hicks Street for seventy years, from 1860 to 1930. Sweeping changes redefined the neighborhood in this period. In 1814, the launch of the first commercial steam ferry from the nearby Brooklyn waterfront attracted the attention of residential developers. By the 1830s, Brooklyn Heights had become “Manhattan’s first commuter suburb,” its streets lined with opulent mansions that overlooked the East River. Thirty years later, the arrival of businesses like the tobacco shop at 78 Montague Street marked the Heights as a commercial hub.

The Montague Street tobacco shop changed owners at least four times between 1862 and 1930. All of its proprietors were immigrants. John R. Wolff and August P. Humburger, both German, operated the business before it was purchased by Englishman George Richmond in 1879. Richmond’s son Henry was the store’s final owner before it closed in 1930. As Henry Richmond himself told a reporter from the Brooklyn Standard Union, his store was “giving way to progress,” his business drying up as larger retailers and grocery stores moved into Brooklyn.

For longtime residents of Brooklyn Heights, the shuttering of the Montague Street tobacco shop marked the end of an era. Despite the figure’s caricature of American Indians in Brooklyn, residents missed the Indian in their neighborhood landscape. For many the carving had been present their entire lives. The seated Indian became the focus of nostalgia for supposedly simpler times, “one of the remaining relics of the days when the Heights was little more than a glorified New England village.” Henry Richmond left Brooklyn Heights in 1930, but his show figure remained, purchased by locals and donated to Long Island Historical Society (now Brooklyn Historical Society).

Among nineteenth-century carved wooden show figures—commonly described in the past as “cigar store Indians”—BHS’s example “sits” apart from the rest. Traditional examples typically follow a standard format: a caricatured and nondescript “Indian” man, standing, simply carved, and elaborately painted. Stripped of the paint that once adorned it, BHS’s seated show figure is nevertheless spectacular, the product of a highly-skilled woodworker.

BHS’s show figure has long been identified as the work of New York City ship carver Charles J. Dodge (1806–1886). A second generation wood sculptor, Dodge trained in the shop of his father, Jeremiah, and actively pursued the trade from the 1820s through the late 1850s. 

Other known wood sculptures attributed to Dodge attest to his skill. Two wooden portrait busts—one of Dodge’s father Jeremiah; the other identified as Dodge’s wife—are expertly carved, with facial features sensitively rendered, and realistic fabric and hair. Along with BHS’s show figure, these artworks are of greater quality than most show figures of the period.

While it is certainly possible that Dodge is the artist of the show figure, new research encourages scrutinizing that long-held attribution. Certain details, including the style of the chair upon which the Native American figure is seated, indicate the show figure might have been carved after Dodge retired from the carving trade. The rustic, tree bark appearance of the chair is typical of the Adirondack furniture craze, not popular in the United States until about 1880. Additionally, New York City directory records indicate that Dodge transitioned from a career as a wood artist in the mid-1850s. In the final decades of his life, he listed his occupation as a commissioner for the New York City Tax Department.

Long Island Historical Society (now Brooklyn Historical Society) became home to the Montague Street show figure in 1930, when local residents—anxious about the city’s rapid growth—decided it needed to be preserved as a symbol of a “simpler time” in Brooklyn. For years, the show figure was displayed prominently in the society’s main lobby and occasionally used in museum displays about local American Indian life.

The show figure eventually became synonymous with LIHS’s public identity. It was featured on institutional branding, and in the 1980s, the museum’s store was even named “the Seated Indian Gift Shop.” Looking back, the insensitivity of these early decisions is plain, missteps perpetuated by the complexity of this historical artifact. It is a beautifully carved piece of American folk art. It was an advertising tool from 1862 to 1930 when it was on display in Montague Street. It was also an agent of oppression.

This sculpture perpetuated racist stereotypes of “noble savages” and concealed the violence and injustices that had been wrought upon American Indian communities from the 1600s to the present. By acknowledging this final truth, BHS also preserves the legacy of the Lenape communities who called New York home for centuries and whose descendants today still live throughout the United States and Canada.