The farmer or anyone working out of doors had to know which way the wind was blowing. In this area, where I come from, an east wind meant rain and always there were weathervanes all over the place. Everybody had one, even a little wooden one, up there ... Everybody was always looking out the window at the weathervane. But the men who worked outside, they knew quite a lot about the weather ... Kids got to know about weathervanes, too. The planned their own activities based on what they knew about the weather.

Anything that the wind would blow or turn made a weathervane. We were always making these arrows from a piece of an old shingle or any old thing we could get a hold of. I must have made a billion of them when I was a kid. We used to worry a hole through with a hot nail held with a pair of pliers and just run a nail down. It would turn on top of a fence post, or if you got really classy, you got up on the barn.

Kenneth Lynch
Kenneth Lynch and Sons, Inc.
Wilton, Connecticut

Kenneth Lynch and his ancestors have been making weathervanes for over one hundred years. The quotation above suggests how much people relied upon weathervanes before our more up-to-date methods of weather forecasting were developed.

Weather, of course, is one of the most important of all natural phenomena. It influences the planting, growing, and harvesting of our crops; hence the availability and abundance of our food supply. It controls our comfort and directly affects our safety on land, sea, or in the air. Any means of predicting weather was just as useful in our civilization's early history as it is today.

During the millennia preceding the invention of the barometer, the only instrument that could help man predict the weather was the weathervane. The little we know about the first use of weathervanes comes mostly form archeological research. The earliest vane of which we have a record was the one on the Tower of the Winds built by Andronicus in Athens during the first century, B.C. We know from contemporary descriptions that this vane took the form off Triton, a sea god of Greek mythology, who had the head and upper body of a man and the tail of a fish. A pointed wand in the sea god's hand indicated the direction from which the wind was blowing. This vane was cast in bronze. With the Greek passion for architectural proportion we can believe that the figure must have been from four to eight feet long in order to look proper atop a forty-five-foot-high temple. We can also assume that smaller, more simple vanes may have been in service many centuries before this one was made.

There is also archeological evidence of metal weathervanes having been used on the Vikings' ships from approximately the ninth century. These were shaped roughly like a quarter of a circle and pivoted along one straight edge with the other flat portion at the top. This type of vane made its way from ships to the steeples of Scandinavian churches in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and some can still be seen in Norway and Sweden.

About a thousand years ago a papal edict declared that the symbol of a rooster be installed at the top of every church in Christendom. The rooster was to serve to recall peter's betrayal of Christ in which Jesus said, "I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me." (Luke 22:34) The cock on the steeple was an admonition to the faithful to come to services so as not to deny Christ as Peter had done.

It is not known exactly when these roosters on the churches were converted to weathercocks or vanes. Literary allusions in Chaucer suggest that cocks were turning with the wind at least by the thirteenth or fourteenth century in England. Logic would indicate that the roosters became weathervanes very quickly because of the eminence of their position on top of the tallest structure in every town. This made it possible to observe the vane without difficulty and from a great distance on a clear day. Curiously, the Roman Catholic churches are no longer capped by weathercocks, and those ecclesiastical roosters that are found today adorn various Protestant houses of worship.

During the middle ages, as the nobility gained ascendancy, or at least equal importance with the church, weathervanes with heraldic motifs began to appear. The insignia of a nobleman's coat of arms, carried on a banner and supported by a rod to keep it unfurled, provided quick recognition of the noble and his retinue to friend an foe. From the banner it was a simple progression to make the insignia in metal and place it on top of a castle for use as a weathervane. Vanes suggesting banners, pennants, and flags remained one of the most popular motifs throughout England and Europe for many centuries. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America they were widely used on churches and public buildings, and in the nineteenth century merchant and industrial princes placed them on newly built mansions to give themselves an air of feudal nobility.

While the medieval nobility were permitted to carry their armorial bearings on a square banner, lesser ranks were allowed pennants with single or double tails. This elongated, trailing pennant was called a banneret, and its form became the prototype for a style of weathervane. The long, graceful lines of the banneret lent themselves admirable to weathervane design. Most of the vanes designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the seventeenth-century English architect, incorporate the feeling of pennants as did the vanes made during the Gothic, Baroque, and Palladian periods of European architecture. Banneret weathervanes also carried over strongly to the period of the Gothic revival in the United States during the nineteenth century.

The better-made weathervanes, or at least the few remaining examples of vanes dating from the seventeenth century in this country, were made abroad and imported by the early settlers. The oldest vane in America of which we have a record is the weathercock made in Holland in 1656 for the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany, New York. This weathercock is still in use and can be viewed on a peak between the twin spires of the First Church in Albany. Among other old American vanes still in existence is a banner with the date 1673 cut into it. This banner is now in the collection of the Concord, Massachusetts, Free Library. Also there is a wooden codfish vane that was originally studded with copper nails (to appear as scales) that once topped Paul Revere's shop and is now on exhibit at the Paul Revere House in Boston.

The making of less sophisticated weathervanes flourished in early rural America. Dependent upon the knowledge of which way the wind was blowing and living too far from the church or town hall to see those vanes, most farmers made their own or hired a local blacksmith to do it for them. In addition to making the traditional rooster, arrow, or banner weathervanes, these workers began fashioning vanes of subjects that were part of their everyday lives. From this period in the latter half of the eighteenth century we see vanes representing Indians, horses, wild animals, and angels. Along the seacoast vanes expressed their builders' concern with nautical matters in the motifs of sailing ships, fish and sea gulls.

After the Revolutionary War patriotic themes became popular, and this country's newly chosen symbol of the eagle became a weathervane subject, although this took more time to come about than the use of the eagle in other forms of decorative art. Particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century, eagles carved from wood, hammered out of copper, or cut from iron appeared on public buildings, flagpoles, and houses. As the country expanded to the west, so did the eagle weathervane.

Weathervanes of the latter half of the nineteenth century, made for the most part by specialist manufacturers, are representations of many factors that led to the rapid growth of this country in that period. They are bound up in the history of the great railroad expansion, the development of new and elaborate fire-fighting equipment, the development of industry, the age of farm speicalization, and the country's interest in exotic animals of other lands. The latter half of the nineteenth century may well be considered the golden age of weathervanes.

Reading up on vanes
A good book to read on weathervanes is Steve Miller's Art of the Weathervane (Schiffer, 1984). Other informative works on vanes are Charles Klamkin's Weathervanes (Hawthorn, 1973) and A gallery of American Weathervanes and Whirligigs (E.P. Dutton, 1981) by Robert Bishop and Patricia Coblentz.
Miller's Book is in print: the latter two volumes may be obtained through your public library.