Weather vanes were used by the ancient Greeks a hundred years before the birth of Christ; by early Scandinavians on their ships; and were common throughout England since William the Conqueror, and throughout Europe since the French Revolution. American vanes were recorded since the seventeenth century — among the first known is the copper cockerel, made in 1656 for the Dutch Reformed Church at Albany. The weather vane found a welcome home in the expanding America of the eighteenth and...
