History, ancient records, and
fiction all record the presence in Boston of one Deacon Shem Drowne,
whose business it was to supply the tradesmen and tavern-keepers of the
day with similar carved images to indicate their calling, or by which to
identify their places of business."[1]
Another, discoursing of this same image, as "Our Oldest Inhabitant,"
after attributing it to the same man's workmanship, states: "Deacon Shem
Drowne, whose name suggests pious and patriarchal, if not nautical
associations, carved the grasshopper which still holds its place over
Faneuil Hall, and also the gilded Indian,[2] who, with his bow bent and
arrow on the string, so long kept watch and ward over the Province
House, the stately residence of the royal Governors of Massachusetts."[3]
This writer repeatedly spells the name wrong. His name was Drowne, not
Droune.[4] In "Drowne's Wooden Image," Hawthorne makes his Shem Drowne a
wood-carver, plain and simple: "He became noted for carving ornamental
pump heads, and wooden urns for gate posts, and decorations, more
grotesque than fanciful, for mantle pieces." "He followed his business
industriously for many years, acquired a competence, and in the latter
part of his life attained to a dignified station in the church, being
remembered in records and traditions as Deacon Drowne, the carver," and
he connects him with the real Shem Drowne of history, only by speaking
of him this once as "Deacon Drowne," and saying: "One of his
productions, an Indian Chief, gilded all over, stood during the better
part of a century on the cupola of the Province House, bedazzling the
eyes of those who looked upward, like an angel of the sun;" plainly
indicating that he thought the Indian was carved from wood, instead of
being made, as it was, of hammered copper.
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