NEWS

Contest captures history of local cigar-store Indian

Peggy Mershon

In 1925, the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a tribute to a vanishing tribe — the wooden cigar-store Indian.

To lure readers to dig around and find those carved sculptures that, if they were lucky, disappeared into basements, not burn barrels, the newspaper came up with a contest — $50 each for the best preserved, the most artistic and the largest.

Then it promised an “outdoor museum” by lining up all the entries on the sidewalk outside its building for a week so they could be admired by the public before disappearing again.

One of those now-rare forms of folk art was hauled on an interurban car from Mansfield: “Ozama, proud daughter of the Delawares,” who had most recently stood outside the Erdenburger Bros. cigar factory on North Main Street.

She was one of fortunate few who was profiled in the Plain Dealer, which took a decidedly lighthearted approach to the project, running stories that had the wooden Indians talking to and about each other, in dialect, although the paper did a distinct service to future collectors by writing down the provenance of some.

Here’s what they said about the Mansfield entry, after having her trash-talking the competition from New Riegel:

“The complete history of Ozama is lost in obscurity, but aged residents of Mansfield recall that she stood for 15 years in front of Calvin C. Townley’s tobacco shop.

“In 1862 Ferdinand Erdenberger went to Mansfield from Wisconsin and started in the cigar business in a little store on North Main Street, which is still standing. About 1865 Erdenberger bought Ozama.

“The senior Erdenberger has long been dead, but his sons carry on the business at the same old stand.

“She is mounted on wooden wheels and is wheeled into the store every night at closing time and back to the sidewalk again in the morning. She has witnessed Mansfield history in the making. She has seen the old corduroy road in front of the store replaced with cobblestones and at last the cobblestones replaced by modern pavement.

“The village hose cart, in the early days, used to dash past the store with speed that was considered astonishing. Then the Erdenberger boys would run out and rescue Ozama, dragging her into the store. Too often the hose cart left the roadway for the sidewalk, and Erdenberger took no chances.

“When Ozama boarded an interurban car for Cleveland, it was the first time in about 65 years that she had journeyed more than 10 feet from her station.”

We are very fortunate that a photo, dated 1896, survives of the wooden Indian on her wheeled cart in from the store surrounded, it appears with great fondness, by the Erdenberger boys and some of their children. Not quite life-size, she appears to be in excellent condition with evidence of polychrome painting.

Unfortunately, she did not win the Plain Dealer contest, and there’s no record of whether she traveled back home on the interurban or was purchased by a museum or collector, because as farcical as the coverage could be, the value of the wooden Indians on display did not escape the experts.

The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, paid $100 for “Seneca John,” winner of the $50 in the “biggest” category and carved by Arnold Ruef, of Tiffin, in the 1880s.

The Union Trust Co. donated its entry to the Western Reserve Historical Museum after winning the prize for best preserved. The bank had found the Indian under a sidewalk when razing the Lennox building to make way for an expansion. Officials learned it had stood in front of a Euclid Avenue tobacco shop for 50 years.

The third winner, for most artistic, was inexplicably a molded metal example christened Hi-muck-a-too-la. Perhaps its status had been raised by an earlier reunion with a former Cleveland owner who said he hadn’t seen it in 40 years.

If anyone out there knows Ozama’s fate, please email me. Cigar-store Indians bring considerably more than $100 these days.

The Plain Dealer stories ran from March 18 through the contest’s end on April 9, with a couple later ones to tie up loose ends and are a wealth of information on these Indians, which were a combination of trade sign and attention-getter for tobacco merchants.

The American antiques trade was just stepping up to the folk-art plate, and several articles quoted experts in the field, including collector, author and dealer Rhea Mansfield Knittle of Ashland, who defended the carved figures against the paper calling them “what-nots.”

Knittle called them works of art as well as reminders of Ohio history: “It is just and fair that the wooden Indian should again hold sway along the old trails, now our Main streets, for of all Americana, nothing is more typical, more full of the vital force of march of empire — outpost, pioneering, memories in out locality — than these near replicas of our chieftains — Logan, Cornstalk, Capt. Pipe and the galaxy of Iroquois, Shawnee and lesser tribal leaders from the earlier forts Le Boeuf, Duquesne and Vincennes days to and past the treaty of Greenville.”

While the newspaper didn’t take her, or the cigar-store Indians, very seriously in 1925, she would earn a full-page feature on those same pages in 1937 as the unchallenged Americana authority in early industries and craftsmen in Ohio. More about Knittle next week.

Peggy Mershon is a retired editor for the News Journal, where she also wrote columns on genealogy and antiques. Contact her at marwelmer@aol.com.