Roger Conant's statue

 

The statue of Roger Conant in Salem, USA. Image credit: Teresa Conant; www.wikitree.com  

Next to Salem Common stands a 9-foot high bronze statue of the Massachusetts city's founder, Roger Conant, born around 1592 in the pretty Devon village of East Budleigh.

‘An imposing, imperious white man,’ is how one of his embarrassed 21^st century American descendants described it recently, at a time when statues of white men have been crashing down both in the USA and in Britain following the Black Lives Matter movement.  

Photo credit: John Andrews and Destination Salem www.salem.org

It doesn’t help that the statue stands outside a former church which has now become Salem’s Witch Museum. Even if you know that the figure most definitely does not represent a witch – ‘rigid and judgemental’ as it has been described by a modern historian of Salem – the statue with its stern Puritan gaze puts one in mind of the cruel witch trials which took place a dozen or so years after Roger Conant’s death.  

But just over a century ago when the finished statue was about to be unveiled, everyone, including the Conant family who had commissioned the statue, was satisfied with the result. Everyone, as the Boston Globe newspaper of 2 September 1910 put it, ‘save the artist himself.’

Sir Henry Hudson Kitson (1863-1947)

For the Anglo-American sculptor Sir Henry Hudson Kitson who was responsible for designing and fashioning the statue, Roger Conant was a remarkable man.  ‘He was a sort of anomaly in his time - not only a man of peace, but essentially a peace-lover, and these facts alone differentiate him from the strict Puritan element,’ Kitson told the newspaper. ‘He loved peace, he ever strove for it’.

‘Moreover,’ he continued, ‘I have tried to depict in the countenance the kindly nature of this man – one of the very few among America’s early settlers who was ever looked upon by the Indians as their true and staunch friend.’

Kitson’s words are surprising. As one of my American correspondents wrote ‘Boy, if the sculptor was really trying to portray Roger C's "kindly nature" and non-"strict" Puritanism, the end result was an epic FAIL!’

Given the artist’s dissatisfaction with his project, one wonders what the real story was. Perhaps Kitson had a falling-out with the Conant family who rejected the idea of kindly features in favour of something steelier. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in the sculptor’s diaries.

Whatever the truth of the matter, in Roger Conant’s home village, he is being presented primarily as a peace-lover who stands out in the hard and violent age in which he lived.

www.salem400.org

Roger Conant was, it has been said, a leader who ‘preferred the public good to his private interests’. A pioneer at a time of persecution and injustice he is celebrated by many of his American descendants today for his moral courage, tolerance and integrity. As the city of Salem prepares to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of its founding in 2026 an increasing number of them are making the journey across the Atlantic to discover their famous ancestor’s birthplace.