The Alpiner Cigar Store Indian

By Jack Klasey

August 9, 2025

Before being allowed to come indoors in the 1970s, "Indian Chief No. 53" survived more than a century of freezing winters and broiling summers standing in front of cigar makers' shops in Chicago and Kankakee, on the riverbank at a private home along Waldron Road, and finally in a fenced enclosure at Governor Small Memorial Park.

More well-known locally as the Alpiner Cigar Store Indian, the colorful life-size metal statue is a featured exhibit today in the Kankakee County Museum. "Indian Chief No. 53" was the name of the statue that cigar maker Solomon Alpiner ordered from a New York wholesaler's catalog, probably in about 1876. The metal Indian was a replacement for a carved wooden statue that was destroyed, along with Alpiner's cigar store and factory, in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Alpiner, an immigrant from Austria, first settled in Kankakee in 1856, when the city was only three years old. He made and sold cigars here for about ten years, then moved to Chicago to form a partnership with Philip Weinreb. The very successful Weinreb & Alpiner firm suffered a severe setback (including the loss of its wooden Indian) in the Chicago Fire, but quickly bounced back.

In 1882, the partnership dissolved, and Alpiner returned to Kankakee. In May of that year, the Kankakee Gazette announced that Solomon Alpiner had purchased the former Enyart grocery store on East Avenue, and remodeled it into "one of the handsomest and most complete cigar factories in the state." At the back of the retail store, a glass partition allowed customers to watch the cigar makers at work. Out front on the sidewalk, of course, the Indian figure advertised the business.

In addition to damage from exposure to the weather, the statue suffered from periodic attacks by vandals. Both the right hand and the left arm of the figure were broken (and clumsily repaired) in the early 1900s. To avoid further vandalism, the statue was hoisted  to the second floor of the building and mounted on a pedestal.

When Alpiner died in 1907, his son, Ben, took over the business. In about the 1930s, the Indian was lowered from his second-floor perch and moved to the Alpiner home on Waldron Road, south of Kankakee. Ben's sister Amelia (Mrs. Robert Stern) remembered that "he placed the Indian in such a position that it looked toward the junction of the Kankakee and Iroquois rivers."

Ben died in 1946, and  in 1954, his widow Mayme loaned  the statue to the Kankakee County Historical Society. It was placed in a fenced enclosure outside the Museum, where it would remain for about 20 years. In 1968, after the death of Mayme Alpiner, Illinois Governor Samuel Shapiro and his wife, Gertrude, inherited the Indian. They decided to donate the statue to the Historical Society in memory of the Alpiners.

Finally, in the mid-1970s, "Indian Chief No. 53" came in out of the rain to become the centerpiece of a display of Native American artifacts. In 1983, Museum officials began searching for a firm or agency that could repair and restore the statue to its original condition. They found that the Sculpture Conservation Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis was willing to take on the project.

A conservator was sent to Kankakee to examine the Indian and determine what work needed to be done. He discovered poorly made repairs to the right hand and left arm, cracks in the metal along seams, holes that had been drilled to fasten the statue to various supports (including one in the center of its chest, where a long bolt had been used to anchor the statue to the second-floor wall of the cigar store), and at least 30 cracked and faded coats of paint that had been applied over the years.

In January, 1984, the heavy statue was loaded aboard a truck for the 230-mile trip to Washington University. Nine months later, the Indian — completely repaired and glowing with the colors it had originally worn more than a century earlier — was back in the Museum. Cost of the work was $9,000, which was paid for by a bequest from a trust established by the Blatt family of Kankakee.

Today, the Alpiner Cigar Store Indian is an important feature of the Kankakee County Museum's largest exhibit, "The Story of Kankakee County." It is displayed along with photographs of East Avenue during the days when that street was home to many of the city's major stores and hotels.

Jack Klasey is a former Journal reporter and a retired publishing executive. He can be contacted at jwklasey@comcast.net.