Shelter Island Reporter photo quiz: What is that?
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Last week’s photo of the grazing sheep (see below) was a mystery to most readers.
Patricia Hanson was the only one to recognize that critter who has been at Prospect Avenue and St. John’s Street “forever,” as Pat said. Not forever, but for 22 summers, when the wooden cutouts, differently colored and decorated, were all over the Island. Pat knew where, but not what it is.
That summer and early autumn of 2002 seems much longer ago than just over a two decades, with all the changes on the Island and in the world. More than 300 of the plywood sheep, as the Reporter wrote at the time “of all hues and clues (and as often clueless) are grazing the Island, as different one from the next, with Islanders painting their own sheep.
“Poet William Blake asked, ‘Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?’ We dost.
“The Shelter Island sheep, like all the rest of us, were conceived in imagination and desire; the purpose of the latter was to get people involved in the 350th Anniversary Committee, which is celebrating the year 1652, when the Sylvester family decided to put down roots. Participating in the project was important, but using the two-dimensional beasts for $25 a pop was also a way of funding the celebrations that will run until Labor Day 2003. Imagination, now that we’re finished with desire, leads us to more questions, such as the one posited by Marx, the esteemed thinker and revolutionary (Groucho), who wondered, ‘Why a duck?’ So we are compelled to ask, Why sheep? Why not, for example, rabbits?
“‘Because,’ Patricia Shillingburg, coordinator of the 350th Anniversary Committee, said ‘rabbits are small, they could get lost, and if we made them bigger they’d be cartoons. Sheep seemed perfect for us; there’s such a long history of us and them here.’ Nathaniel Sylvester kept hundreds, all inventoried in his will … As late as the 1930s there were flocks here, when residents, because of the Depression, returned to subsistence farming and working the sea. Ms. Shillingburg called on her friend, artist Friedrike Merck, who quickly sketched designs, and James Eklund, along with Roy Pellicano and Paul Petersen, dubbed ‘The Herdsmen,’ volunteered to jigsaw the designs, and the Shelter Island sheep came to be. The first to display the sheep was Alice Fiske, whose late husband Andrew followed his line back to Nathaniel Sylvester.”
One notable sheep, photographed by Joanne Sherman, had written across its woolly body: Please Don’t Blaaahck The Driveway.
Ms. Shillingburg, the renowned Island author and historian, who passed away in 2016, was asked at the end of the 2002 Reporter story what it meant for Islanders to display their decorated sheep. She answered with one word: “Optimism.”
