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Cape Cod’s Elmer Crowell, the First and Best Decoy Maker

In 1900, an Elmer Crowell decoy sold for $2. In 2007, an Elmer Crowell decoy sold for $1.13 million. And so did a second one.

What started out as a side hustle for the Cape Cod carver turned into a full-time job and worldwide fame. From a converted chicken coop that smelled like cedar wood shavings and oil paint, he made decoys now displayed in museums throughout North America and Europe. Collectors consider Elmer Crowell the father of decorative wood carving. Many consider him the best.

Elmer Crowell

“There was really no one in the world doing what he was doing,” Ted Harmon told Cape Cod Life in 2016. Others followed, and during a golden age of decoy carving Massachusetts produced some of the best and most prolific decoy carvers in the world.

“He was decades ahead of everyone else,” said Harmon, a collector and owner of the Decoys Unlimited auction house in Barnstable, Mass.

Elmer Crowell

He was born during the Civil War, on Dec. 5, 1862, in East Harwich, Mass., to a family of mariners and cranberry farmers. His father bought him a shotgun at age 12. He set up a duck blind on family property by 716-acre Long Pond. Then he immersed himself in hunting.

Cover illustration from Puck magazine.

He used both live and wooden decoys to attract birds from the great flocks that migrated along the Atlantic flyway and paused on Cape Cod’s waters. At 14, he began carving his own wooden decoys.

He found he could do what he loved and augment his wages from cranberry farming. Restaurants then had a strong appetite for wild fowl. In 1889, for example, one Chicago menu offered, blue-wing teal, pheasant, wild goose, quail, prairie chicken, sage hen, blackbirds, plover, partridge, two kinds of snipe, three kinds of grouse and four kinds of duck. A popular menu item was the reed bird, one of four to six small birds plucked and served on a skewer.

Elmer Crowell and the Three Bears

But hunting also became popular among well-heeled sportsmen along the Eastern Seaboard. The once-excellent railroad system out of Boston made it easy to reach coastal marshes, ponds and beaches. The railroads also carried gamebirds to the urban restaurants and markets.

Cape Cod attracted men like Daniel Webster and Grover Cleveland, who often hunted and fished there. Three affluent gentlemen who called themselves the Three Bears hunted together on Long Pond played a big role in the life of Elmer Crowell. They were G. Herbert Windeler, U.S. Golf Association president; Loring Underwood, landscape architect and gentleman photographer; and Charles Ashley Hardy, a stockbroker who built a hunting lodge called the Chatham Bars Inn, now a Historic America Hotel.

The Three Bears realized Elmer Crowell was outgunning them on Long Pond. They recognized his skill at handling live decoys, and they hired him to run their hunting camp. They then came to realize his extraordinary carving and painting skills, according to Kate Beckerman in Antiques and the Arts Weekly.

Hardy in particular fell in love with Elmer Crowell’s decoys, and he asked him to carve decorative birds: a Hudsonian curlew, a common snipe and a pair of bobwhite quail. Later, Hardy would help set up Crowell’s studio in an old chicken coop.

Elmer Crowell outside his shop.

Crowell sold his cheapest, utilitarian model for 25 cents. He also offered a “challenge,” or middle-level grade, for $1. His top-grade decoys sold for $2 – or maybe a bucket of quahogs. Some he gave as gifts.

Along the way Crowell married a Harwich neighbor, Laura Linwood Doane. They had one son, Cleon, who later took up carving with his father.

Phillips

Another wealthy hunting client, Dr. John C. Phillips, had a profound impact on Elmer Crowell’s life. Phillips, grandnephew of abolitionist Wendell Phillips, wrote more than 200 books and articles about ornithology, zoology and wildlife conservation.

In 1900, Phillips persuaded Crowell to leave Cape Cod and manage his hunting camp (designed by Frederick Law Olmsted) on Wenham Lake on Boston’s North Shore. Crowell then ran Phillips’ gunning stand on Oldham Pond in Pembroke, Mass. In his spare time, he carved and painted decoys, which Phillips and his rich hunting friends prized. Though Crowell only worked for Phillips for 10 years, the doctor bought decoys from him until his death in 1938.

An Elmer Crowell canvasback duck (miniature), from the Centerville Historical Society collection.

Another important Brahmin customer was Harry Vinton Long, Nathaniel Bowditch’s son-in-law. A stockbroker and director of the Museum of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Long owned a home in Cohasset, Mass., that offered spectacular birdwatching and hunting.

Long, an avid birdwatcher who collected Americana, naturally prized Elmer Crowell’s decoys. He bought some of Crowell’s finest work, and he spread the word among his rich friends about the man he considered a national treasure.

One duck hunter kept his Elmer Crowell yellowlegs in a velvet bag when he didn’t deploy it on the marsh.

Migratory Bird Act

But Elmer Crowell saw the writing on the wall – or, rather, in the state and federal governments. They had started to crack down on the market gunners who supplied restaurants with wildfowl. The market gunners took down hundreds of birds at a time, thousands in a day. By the end of the 19th century, gunners had driven to extinction Labrador ducks, great auks, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets and heath hens.

Labrador ducks, now extinct

Conservationists pressured lawmakers to ban hunting migratory birds, and lawmakers responded. In 1918, Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which made it a crime to hunt, kill or sell a migratory bird or its parts. They also banned the use of live decoys to attract birds.

“The shooting was great,” Crowell later recalled. “But we could not sell them in the markets, as the law cut it out. Soon the law cut out the live decoys, and that was the end of good shooting there.”

The Songless Aviary

In 1912, 50-year-old Elmer Crowell set up shop in East Harwich and began carving decoys full time, six days a week. Hardy helped him acquire more tools and convert an old chicken coop into a workshop.

He called it his songless aviary.

Crowell became consumed with capturing the exact likeness of a species, and he made dozens of different kinds of ducks, geese, shorebirds, songbirds and miniatures. He made plovers, sandpipers, curlews, yellowlegs, warblers, woodpeckers, robins, bluebirds, blackbirds and catbirds.

Ironically, he advertised his wares with a decoy on a post in front of his driveway. It was a hooded merganser. one of the few birds he didn’t get quite right, according to John S. Dumont, the son of a client who studied woodcarving with him.

His great-granddaughter’s best friend, Juell Buckwold, recalled her frequent visits to the old man with the chubby face and the bright blue eyes.

Elmer Crowell with a miniature

She remembered a cheery gentleman in too-short black pants with wood shavings at his feet. Crowell sat and whittled as men hung around his workshop and talked about decays. He was always willing to share what he was doing, his love for bird and how he carved, she said. He would hand children a knife and let them try it for themselves.

His son, Cleon, carved along with him. Together, father and son also did carpentry, remodeling houses and making weathervanes.

Miniature knot from the Centerville Historical Society collection.

Crowell carved miniatures, as well. He sold songbirds and shorebirds in sets of 25 or individually. In 1930, he sold such a set for $100. In 2020, a set with his business card and a list of the birds on his stationery sold for $108,000.

Decoy Collecting Becomes a Thing

Elmer Crowell’s fame grew among wealthy decoy collectors. He sold his decoys to Henry Ford, Pierre S. du Pont, James Storrow, Massachusetts Gov. Leverett Saltonstall, the royals in England and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

Rheumatism forced Elmer Crowell to retire in 1943, and Cleon took over. Elmer died on Jan. 1, 1952 at the age of 89. He had carved an estimated 15,000 decoys in his lifetime, 9,000 of which are believed to survive in museums and private collections.

“There is no question that he carved some of the finest shorebird decoys known,” writes By John M. Levinson, Somers G. Headley in Shorebirds: The Birds, the Hunters, the Decoys.

By the 1950s, decoy collecting had spread beyond wealthy sportsmen and Cape Cod tourists. An Iowan named Harold Sorenson began publishing a magazine called The Decoy Collector’s Guide. Then in 1967, Richard Bourne of Hyannis held the first ever auction of wildfowl decoys. The auctions proved popular, setting benchmark prices, and soon expanded to three a year.

Elmer Crowell, Record Setter

Crowell decoys routinely fetch six-figure prices, and his were the first to reach seven figures. His decoys set a record in 2007, just before the financial crash, with a pintail drake and Canada goose that sold for $1.13 million.

In 2022, a pair of working canvasback duck decoys, made around 1920, brought $102,000 at a Copley Fine Art’s auction.

After his death in 1952, the barn started to decay. Several Cape Codders established the A.E. Crowell American Bird Decoy Foundation. One member took apart the barn in 2008, marked all the boards and stored it in a storage container in Sandwich. The Foundation raised money and found a new home for the songless aviary, now under the auspices of the Harwich Historical Society

The songless aviary is now located at 80 Parallel Street, Harwich, Mass. With thanks to the Harwich Historical Society.

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The Branded Hand of Jonathan Walker: Emblem of Slave Stealing or Slave Savior?

In 1844, Florida slave-holders believed Jonathan Walker deserved the punishment of a branded hand. Walker, after all, had tried to steal seven of their able-bodied workers.

One slave-holder watched with delight as a federal marshal pressed a red-hot branding iron into the palm of Walker’s hand. For 15 seconds it made a spattering sound, like salt in a fire.

But the slave-holders’ cruelty toward Jonathan Walker only backfired. He took his branded hand on the road, where it created a sensation. Walker would wade into the audience with his callused seaman’s palm outstretched. People could see the letters “SS” – for slave stealer.

A daguerreotype of Jonathan Walker’s branded hand was also reproduced many times in books, broadsides and newspapers. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem about it, proclaiming “SS” stood for ‘Salvation to the Slave.’

Walker suffered other atrocities at the hand of the slave-holders. But when he died in 1878, Frederick Douglass remembered the branded hand. “It was one of the few atrocities of slavery that roused the justice and humanity of the North to a death struggle with slavery,” he wrote.

Pensacola

On June 4, 1844, Jonathan Walker sailed into Pensacola, Fla., in a little green sloop. He immediately aroused suspicion. A Cape Cod native, he had lived in Pensacola before with his wife and many children. The community leaders remembered how he’d befriended the colored people. Some had even cautioned him about it.

Though Pensacola was a backwater, it had a cosmopolitan, interracial population. As a port city on the Gulf of Mexico, it offered plenty of jobs for free black and white fishermen, mariners, lumberjacks, stevedores, shipwrights and carpenters. People of different ethnicities and racial makeups competed for jobs, but they also cooperated.

Jonathan Walker

That caused a problem for the slave-holders of Pensacola. They knew the Underground Railroad ran south as well as north. Fugitives from slavery in the Deep South often fled to Pensacola for refuge – and passage aboard a ship to freedom.

The reappearance of Jonathan Walker therefore aroused some concern. A circular later described him as ‘a man of large frame, about six feet high, with dark hair and dark complexion, a suspicious countenance, slouchy person, stooping shoulders and a swinging, rolling gait–is lame in one arm from a gunshot wound.’

He had boarded with a colored woman, and he worked on his boat in her yard. “He seems to have had no reasonable or proper business here,” the circular read.

Jonathan Walker

Actually, Jonathan Walker did have business there. He intended to raise a sunken wreck for its copper.

The gunshot wound? He’d been sailing along the Gulf coast, carrying cargo, when he ran aground and robbers shot him. During that time he had also carried fugitives from slavery to Mexico.

He was born in Harwich, Mass., on March 22, 1799, to Seth and Marcy Walker. He went to sea at 17, and continued for 19 years, sometimes staying on land and working in a shipyard. He built his own boat, so people called him captain.

Along the way he met and married Jane Gage, and together they had nine children. They named each after a famous abolitionist of the day: Lloyd Garrison Walker, George Fox Walker, Nancy Child Walker.

By 1844 he had moved his family back to Cape Cod.

While in Pensacola, three men approached him and asked him to take them to the Bahamas.

Missing Slaves

One day Jonathan Walker laid in bread, pork, molasses, cheese and water. On June 22, he set sail before daybreak one day. Two fishermen asked him where he was headed, and he said to Mobile – but headed in a different direction.

That same day, seven black men, all enslaved, disappeared with nearly all of their clothing.

“The belief exists that Jonathan Walker has carried these slaves off in his boat,” read the circular. Slave -holders R.C. Caldwell and George Willis offered a reward of $1,000 for his capture and conviction.

One rainy July day, Jonathan Walker returned to Pensacola on the steamboat General Taylor – under arrest. Despite the downpour, a large, noisy crowd greeted him at the dock. He could barely walk.

He had taken ill from sunstroke on the voyage to the Bahamas, and his boat drifted until a salvage sloop overtook him. The captain of the sloop arrested them and sent them back to Pensacola.

The courtroom overflowed with onlookers as a magistrate charged Jonathan Walker with stealing four slaves. He set bail at $10,000, which Walker couldn’t pay. He collapsed on the way to jail and had to be carried in a cart. The jailer bound his legs in irons. For days he slept and ate on the hard floor.

Prison Horrors

Jonathan Walker would spend four months in prison. His jailer put him in heavy irons, made him sit and lie on the hard floor and charged him $25 rent.

His sickness and severe treatment reduced him to a skeleton. “Many a time I have grasped round my leg above the knee joint, over my pants, with one hand so as to meet thumb and finger,” he wrote.

He could see into the filthy kitchen, where the dogs licked the cooking utensils and cats walked on the cutting boards. The cook was enslaved, and the jailer’s wife beat her frequently with a rawhide whip, from 20 to 50 strokes at a time.

Though sick and starving, the screams of the children bothered him most. The cook had a child, the jailer had three, and they all screamed for six hours at a time, causing him severe headaches. “There is a vast difference between crying naturally and occasionally, and screaming at the top of one’s voice with rage and passion,” he wrote.

After a while he moved to another cell, where fresh blood stained the door. One of the men he had tried to take to the Bahamas killed himself by cutting his throat and belly with a razor. He’d been falsely accused of stealing; the item turned up after someone else had moved it. The man who committed suicide hadn’t done anything wrong.

Illustration of the branding of Jonathan Walker’s hand

Sentenced to a Branded Hand

In November, Jonathan Walker went to trial in federal court for stealing Anthony Catlett, Silas Scott, Charles Johnson and his brother Moses. He was found guilty, to no one’s surprise. The judge sentenced him to the pillory, the branded hand, a fine and more prison time.

A silent crowd watched as Jonathan Walker stood in the pillory. Then George Willis, one of the slave-holders, snatched a handkerchief from Walker’s head, where it shielded him from the sun. He took two rotten eggs from his pocket and, wrote Walker, “He hurled them very spitefully at my head.” That ‘excited a burst of indignation from the bystanders.’

After his hour was up he washed his head with water, then went to the courtroom. The marshal tied his hand to the railing. A blacksmith had made a special branding iron for Walker after two had refused to do it. The marshal pressed the brand against his hand firmly for 15 or 20 seconds. The pain was severe, wrote Walker. Only a few watched, but George Willis ‘feasted his eyes upon it.’

His ordeal didn’t end there. While still in prison, he was charged with stealing the other three fugitives. A jury found him guilty. Jonathan Walker finally received some mercy, though. The jurors assessed him a fine of $5 for each offense.

Finally, after a year of suffering in prison, Jonathan Walker went home to Plymouth, Mass., with his branded hand. He endured it all, he wrote, for ‘an act of kindness towards some of the down-trodden of some of my own countrymen.’

The Man With the Branded Hand

Walker continued his fight against slavery, traveling the abolitionist lecture circuit. He wasn’t much of a speaker, though, so after speaking for a few moments he held up his branded hand. He called it, ‘the seal, the coat of arms of the United States.’ Then he walked into the crowd to show them his hand.

His abolitionist activities kept him in poverty, though. Once, when two fugitives from slavery and their small children arrived in Plymouth, Walker was furious that his neighbors did little to help them. He invited them to stay in his small cabin, but he had little food or heat and they soon left.

Eventually the Walker family moved west. He died on May 1, 1878 in Muskegon, Mich. A monument was erected on his grave at Evergreen Cemetery. The Harwich Historical Society erected a plaque in front of Brooks Academy commemorating Jonathan Walker.

With thanks to Matthew Clavin for his book, Aiming for Pensacola. Also to A Short Sketch of the Life and Services of Jonathan Walker: The Man with a Branded Hand with a Poem by John G. Whittier and an Address by Hon. Parker Pillsbury, One of Walker’s Anti-slavery Friends, and a Funeral Oration by Rev. F.E. Kittredge and Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola. This story was updated in 2022.

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