One of our favorite artifacts in the collection has four legs and a tail.
In 2021, Sailor the iron dog was added to the BMI collections as a permanent fixture of our waterfront campus. For over a century the statue adorned the yard of a
home in Brooklandville, MD before it was generously donated to the museum by its last owner, Dorothea Lankford. The life-size statue was modeled after Newfoundland pups Sailor and Canton, who were rescued from an 1807 shipwreck off the coast of Maryland and bred into the modern day Chesapeake Bay retriever. Sailor is more than a pretty face on the BMI campus. He is one of the few remaining metal dogs produced by the Bartlett-Hayward metalworking company in the 1850s and an example of cast-iron animal sculptures that once decorated businesses and homes across America.
In the 1850s, iron statues of animals were popular lawn ornaments. Baltimore’s Bartlett-Hayward Company, the largest iron foundry in the nation, created Sailor and Canton as mascots for their business.
For many years, Sailor kept watch on the front lawn of the Lankford Family home. According to Dorothea, Sailor has “always been loved and played on by children.” When it came time to sell her home, Dorothea felt strongly that Sailor should find a new home at the BMI, “where it can tell its Baltimore and Maryland story [and] be preserved and safely enjoyed by many more children for years to come.”
Visit the BMI’s Machine Shop gallery to see the hand-carved wooden pattern that was made to create the mold used for the dogs.
Sailor, the Iron Dog, being installed on the BMI campus on October 8, 2021. Dorothea is particularly happy that Sailor has found a new home on the museum’s campus, outside and looking out on the Inner Harbor: “a great spot for a water dog to rest.”
