Few Old Signs Left

1920

Many of the familiar trade signs used to advertise business enterprises have been discarded entirely in the onward sweep of advertising progress or displaced by more or less artistic displays of paint and electric lights.

One of the most common of the oldtimers that has vanished, says the New York Sun, was the wooden Indian, which kept its silent, stolid vigil beside the door of the tobacconist. The significant boot that once was suspended over the shop of the repairer of boots and shoes is also only a memory. So are the anvil hanging above the entrance to the blacksmith's shop and the horse's heads over livery-men's doorways.

The origin of the cigar store Indian dates back to Sir Walter Raleigh and his English settlers in our sunny South. These fortune seekers, visiting the unseen New World in the seventeenth century, and for the first time in the history of the white race learning the use of the tobacco weed from the North American Indian, symbolized this industry by the red man's imposing figure.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Jan. 3, 1920, p. 6.