How To Date A Lawn Jockey

They've been around for hundreds of years. You still come across them in some front yards in parts of the United States and 33 of them line the wrought-iron entrance to the 21 Club, New York City's famous onetime speakeasy. They are lawn jockeys, or men, dressed in riding silks, their right or left arm extended up belongings a band or a lantern. Depending on their colour and the cut of their textile, they are either a cornball nod to historic hospitality or a hated symbol of racism. Context is everything.

Starting in the 18th century, lawn jockeys were cast of solid iron or zinc, weighed 300 or more pounds, and were used as hitching posts almost oftentimes in front end of tobacco shops. The U.S. Patent Office issued patent no. 5,875 to Robert Wood of Philadelphia in 1872 for a "hitching post in the form, shape, and costume of a 'Jockey.' "

3 major manufacturers in New York and Pennsylvania marketed their products through catalogs. A 1910 catalog showed 3 variations allegorical of the times (and hopelessly stereotypical to modern optics): a white jockey, wearing natty silks and riding helmet; a Chinese man, holding a folding fan and wearing a peaked harbinger lid and sandals; and a barefoot black servant draped in work clothes.

The entrance the 21 Club in Manhattan uses 33 jockeys to welcome its patrons. Photo: David Shankbone – CC BY 2.5

The entrance the 21 Society in Manhattan uses 33 jockeys to welcome its patrons. Photo: David Shankbone – CC By ii.five

The origin of the black jockey has been linked to the fable of Jocko Graves, a young boy helping George Washington in the Revolutionary War. In this story, a 12-twelvemonth-old Jocko follows his male parent to join General Washington's Army as it crosses the Delaware River on Christmas Eve 1776. The general won't allow the young man to fight and instead orders him to stand on the riverbank holding a lantern, so the men volition know the way dorsum to military camp after battle. When they return two days after, they detect that the loyal immature Jocko has frozen to decease, still clutching the lamp. Washington was then said to accept created an iron likeness of Jocko as a hitching post, "The Faithful Groomsman."

There is no evidence that Jocko Graves existed. Historians point out the story is counterfeit, as are many Washington legends, meant to prove the American founder'south generosity of spirit.

During the 1800s, the backyard jockey evolved from a boy in a piece of work shirt and jeans to an obsequious black servant with caricatured optics and lips (an offensive depiction today) to an upright white man in fancy riding silks. It is, unsurprisingly, this concluding blazon of jockey that stands outside New York's 21 Club.

Example bearing a lantern in Guyton, Georgia, USPhoto: Jud McCranie -CC BY-SA 4.0

Example bearing a lantern in Guyton, Georgia, US
Photo: Jud McCranie -CC Past-SA 4.0

Another fanciful legend posits that the lawn jockey was used in Clandestine Railroad years to point safety or danger to runaway slaves. The jockey'due south arm pointed to safety houses. A scarf tied to the jockey's ring served as a message.

"These statues were used equally markers on the Hush-hush Railroad throughout the Southward into Canada," historian and author Charles Blockson, curator of the Afro-American Drove at Temple Academy in Philadelphia, told the Lexington Herald-Leader. "Greenish ribbons were tied to the arms of the statue to point safety; red ribbons meant to go on going."

Blockson, the cracking-grandson of a slave who escaped to Canada on the hugger-mugger railroad, said lawn jockeys stood outside rich people'south houses on Philadelphia's Chief Line and on the streets of his own neighborhood of Norristown when he was growing up. He told the Washington Mail service in 2006, he hated the sight of them.

Example bearing a lantern in Perry, Georgia, USPhoto: Jud McCranie CC BY-SA 4.0

Example begetting a lantern in Perry, Georgia, US
Photograph: Jud McCranie CC BY-SA 4.0

"People who don't know the history of the jockey have feelings of humiliation and anger when they encounter the statue," Blockson said. "But this figure which was sometimes used in a clandestine nature, and sometimes without the cognition of the person who owned the statue, was a positive and supportive image to African-Americans on the road to freedom."

Information technology'southward a cool story merely unverifiable and fifty-fifty problematic, every bit pointed out by the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, which reminded readers that delinquent slaves traveled at night, making colors difficult to discern.

Related story from the states: 19th-century aristocrats hired men to grow long hair and fingernails and pose in the garden as "ornamental hermits"

Red and light-green scarves were used equally railroad signals in Globe State of war I, long afterward the Hole-and-corner Railroad. David Pilgrim, the Jim Crow Museum's curator did acknowledge that the lawn jockey'due south employ as a betoken wasn't impossible. "Given that slavery lasted more two hundred years, it is likely that information technology happened at least once," Pilgrim wrote in 2008. "Nevertheless, there is niggling evidence that this practise was widespread."

In the early on 1910s, the lawn jockey went the mode of the carriage—that is to say, killed off by the appearance of automobile travel.

E.L. Hamilton has written almost pop culture for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including Rolling Stone, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, the New York Post and the New York Daily News. She lives in fundamental New Jersey, only w of New York Metropolis