March of the Giants: Roadside Paul Bunyan Statues

March of the Giants: Roadside Paul Bunyan Statues

An interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen in my travels around the northeast is a crop of Paul Bunyan statues sprinkled around the region.  I’ve seen them in Cheshire, Connecticut, Georgetown, Massachusetts, and Elmsford, New York.  I’ve seen pictures of one in Bangor, Maine.  Some of these, like the one in Elmsford, aren’t called Paul Bunyan, but “muffler man”.  But we all know it’s really a Paul Bunyan statue in disguise.

These roadside curiosities are generally used to draw attention to a business.  And they do the job year in and year out.  Of those that I’ve run into, the statue in Cheshire is my favorite.  Not because it’s especially detailed, it’s more that its the first one I really paid attention to.  And there’s a great story of the guy who owns it sticking a flag pole in Paul’s hands because there was no restriction on the height of a flagpole but there was objection to the size of the statue when he originally put it up.  That’s a true yankee right there.