Incollect Magazine - Issue 3

Incollect Magazine 19 2022 Museum in Washington, D.C., said: “Even from today’s vantage point, it’s still one of the great events, one of the most significant events in the history of flight.” It showed the world the enormous potential of powered flight and made Paris the capital of aviation, shifting that distinction away from the United States and the Wright Brothers, who had made the first manned flights in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina just six years earlier. Louis Blériot on the runway before his historic flight. July 25, 1909. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs, Washington, D.C. In their book A Gallery of American Weathervanes & Whirligigs, Robert Bishop and Patricia Coblenz state that “tradition indicates” that the weathervane was made to commemorate Louis Blériot winning air races held in Portland and Poland Spring Maine soon after his channel flight. In Maine Antique Digest editor Sam Pennington’s article about the Blériot XI Monoplane Weathervane’s sale at the June 1974 auction of famed folk art dealer Chris and Ellen Huntington’s collection, Pennington relates that the Bleriot weathervane was sold to a man who had driven from New York City determined to buy it and that he paid $8,500. Although not identified, the buyer was almost certainly Dr. William Greenspon, a prominent New York folk art collector who Bishop and Coblentz credit as the weathervane’s owner. Pennington also reports that Chris Huntington had acquired the weathervane from the vacant Poland Spring House the previous fall (1973) where it had been in place “since before 1914,” and that “several in the crowd remarked that they had remembered seeing it there all their lives.” It was lucky that Huntington removed the weathervane from the massive old Victorian hotel when he did, because the historic building burned to the ground on July 3, 1975. This photograph of the Blériot Model XI Monoplane Weathervane in place on the hotel was published in the Poland Spring House’s 1914 Newsletter. Both through its own remarkable presence as well as the spirit of the Blériot air races it conjures and honors, this one-of-a-kind weathervane embodies the visionary, anything-is-possible zeitgeist of its time as well as any artifact of the era. The Poland Spring House in Poland Spring, Maine, was a popular Gilded Age resort hotel and spa that was built in 1876. Poland Spring was a Maine landmark that drew visitors from across the country, who came for both the resort’s commodious accommodations and healing waters. The Poland Spring company is still a major bottler of still and carbonated Maine spring water. The weathervane was probably placed on the building in 1913 or earlier. It is one of the few early twentieth-century weathervanes that represents an airplane of any kind, and its imposing scale alone sets it apart. The weathervane is roughly one-sixth the size of the original plane, which measured 25 feet long with a wingspan of 25 ft. 7 in. with a height of 8 ft. 10 in. While the shop that created this unique special-ordered weathervane is unknown, the heart of the weathervane industry was clearly entrenched in New England, so it was possibly made in the Boston area, where several manufacturers of high quality weathervanes had been in business since the middle of the nineteenth century. The weathervane was made entirely of copper, the dominant material of American weathervane makers from the 1850s on. Most likely the Blériot XI Monoplane Weathervane was commissioned by the Poland Spring House. The shop chosen was also likely to have been sent a set of Blériot’s drawings that they could work from scale to complete their special order. One possible candidate is the W.A. Snow Iron Works in Boston.