Smithtown celebrates statue: 'Whisper the Bull' going strong after 80 years

Smithtown officials on Monday marked the 80th anniversary of the placement of the 14-foot, 5-ton bronze statue commonly known as Whisper the Bull on West Main Street.

"We wish him praises and good wishes for what he’s done at the entrance of Smithtown and watching over the Smithtown community," Supervisor Edward Wehrheim told a small crowd of town staffers, officials and Richard and Jennifer Smith, cousins and descendants of the town’s founding family.

Monday’s was a quieter affair than the original dedication, which attracted 500 people, according to a front-page story from 1941 in a local newspaper, "The County Review." In those pre-boom years the town’s population was about 14,000.

By the '40s the bull already loomed large in founding myth as the animal Smithtown’s founder rode to establish the town boundaries. Sometimes in those myths an Indian chief does the bequeathing of the land; according to that newspaper, it was the British Crown.

The Review article sketches a history of the statue: created by a Wheatley Heights man, sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey, at the suggestion of Lawrence Smith Butler when they were in Paris before World War I. It was offered to the town in 1926 for the price of $12,000, or $179,577 in today’s dollars, but residents did not raise the money. The statue spent time in front of the Brooklyn Museum and in a Long Island City warehouse before the town got it free, from Rumsey’s heirs, paying only the unspecified cost of transport.

Another contemporary newspaper account details the artist’s fate: dead at 43 in 1922 in a horrific Jericho Turnpike car crash outside Floral Park. He was, that story notes, a splendid polo player and the son-in-law of railways tycoon E.H. Harriman.

Brad Harris, Smithtown’s town historian, said in an interview that Rumsey’s inspiration might have come partly from a rampant bull on the Smith family crest. Harris said it was likely that the members of the Butler and Smith families paid for the statue’s massive base. "I don’t think that’s something the administration at the time would have gone for. They were pretty tight with a buck."

Harris described the bull as "reared back on his hindquarters a little bit, with his neck proudly arched." The bull’s eyes bulge from its skull, a bit of artistic license in what is otherwise an anatomically faithful rendering.

In the 80 years since the statue was placed, several automobiles have crashed into it, or its pedestal, and a topless bar has sprung up across the street, to the chagrin of elected officials and civic leaders. Generations of teenagers vandalized it, and Richard Smith, Nissequogue Village mayor, said that town leaders became worried enough in the 1950s that they considered neutering the bull. They abandoned the idea after meeting opposition at a town board meeting, he said.

The vandalism largely ended after officials installed surveillance cameras in 2018, according to Smith and town spokeswoman Nicole Garguilo, and Wehrheim in his remarks said town officials plan new flowers and landscaping near the base of the statue in coming months.

The bull, going strong at 80, remains one of the town's most prominent pieces of public art.