English: Paying homage to the name and early history of the village of Painted Post, New York is the Seneca Indian Monument, a 8-foot bronze figure of an American Indian warrior standing in front of a wooden post, his arm raised in greeting. Sculpted in 1950 by local high school art teacher Norman B. Phelps, this is actually the replacement for a much earlier statue commissioned in 1824 by Captain Samuel Erwin, which was destroyed in a violent windstorm in 1948. Originally located in the center divider in the middle of Hamilton Street, the statue was later relocated to its present site at Village Square Park. The post that serves as the village's namesake and which is depicted in the sculpture was a puzzling landmark discovered in the 1780s by Freeborn Patchin, an erstwhile Revolutionary War militiaman who at the time was a war captive of Mohawk chief Joseph Brant; it supposedly was painted red and carved with twenty-eight images of human figures, some headless. When the original post became too worn and decayed, the villagers carved and erected a replacement, kicking off a curious local tradition that persists to this day; the modern-day post is seen at right in this photo.