For over a century, towns in New England have presented their oldest residents with ceremonial canes. In some places, the honor endures — for those willing to accept it, that is.
WHY WE’RE HERE
We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. In towns across New England, antique canes or their replicas are bestowed on the oldest residents.
For more than a century, when selectmen in Rye, N.H., honored the town’s oldest resident, the title came with a distinctive trophy: a gold-topped, ebony walking cane, engraved with the town’s name, that was theirs to keep for as long as they might live.
But when the town feted its latest honorees in November — Marion Cronin and Barbara Long, born on the same day in 1921 — that cane was nowhere in sight. Instead, town officials presented a less fancy replica; the original was safely locked up in the town museum. There was good reason for that.
Across New England, 700 towns once handed out canes just like the one in Rye’s museum, a practice that began in 1909 when a Boston newspaper publisher, Edwin Grozier, started a brilliant regional marketing scheme. Determined to revive his failing Boston Post, he gave the sleek canes to towns across Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island — puzzlingly, Connecticut and Vermont were overlooked — and requested that they “be presented with the compliments of the Boston Post to the Oldest Citizen.”