You're so vane

Good looks attract homeowners to weather vanes.

Published online on Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007

There aren't many weather vanes like the one standing atop Jeffrey Smith's garage in Oakhurst. This one, in the shape of a train, is handmade by a local coppersmith.

"It's an old steam engine and coal car," says Smith, a 61-year-old retired train conductor for Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway of the stationary weather vane. "The north is facing north, but it doesn't rotate because it's so heavy."

For centuries, weather vanes have stood tall and proud, perched on rooftops, spinning at the whim of the wind. They're still popular, but their purpose has changed in recent years. Homeowners now tend to buy them more for their decorative appeal than their intended function.

"In this day in age, everyone's got weather.com on their computer" if they want to know which way the wind is blowing, says Mike Grill, the hardware department manager at Fresno Ag Hardware in Fresno. Weather vanes are "more of an aesthetic thing or a finishing touch on a house, barn or gazebo. With them being so personable now and there being so many choices, [people] can find many that fit their personality or the style of their house."

Wind instruments

Although the inventor of the first weather vane may never really be known, these wind devices have been vital to many through the ages.

"Weather vanes had their roots in forms that were developed out of early man's need to understand and predict the most ephemeral of nature's forces -- the wind," write Robert Bishop and Patricia Coblentz, authors of "A Gallery of American Weathervanes and Whirligigs" (E.P. Dutton, $27.50).

"The need to predict with a relative degree of accuracy the changes in weather heralded by the direction of the wind certainly led to the development of the weathervane, one of the first meteorological instruments devised."

Early weather vanes were made of metal or wood and usually had designs that included arrows or heads that turned in the direction of the wind. They typically rotated on a pole.

Early settlers to America are believed to have used them. "Weathervanes were unquestionably used in mid-17th-century America," Bishop and Coblentz wrote. "Although no specific New World vane is known to exist from this period, marginal decorations on early maps in the form of cityscapes illustrate their use in New York in the last half of the 17th century."

Additionally, they wrote: "The weathervane was extremely popular in America because weather forecasting was vitally important to the seafaring and agricultural lives led by the Colonists. It also became a symbol of newfound social and political equality because any man could now raise an elaborate metal banner as a make-believe coat of arms over his home or farm."

It was during this time that stationary compass pointers were added to weather vanes, according to Bishop and Coblentz. "These made it easier to determine accurately in which direction the head of the vane was pointing as it turned in the wind."

The evolution of decoration

Weather vanes -- whether wood or metal, three-dimensional or flat silhouettes -- were originally handcrafted. Designs included animals, such as roosters, pigs and fishes, and scenes or images, such as mermaids and trains.

But the Industrial Revolution eventually changed how they were made. "The weathervane, like so many other consumer goods, was no longer economical to create by hand," Bishop and Coblentz wrote. "Commercial, large-scale production vanes became more realistic and the innovative, one-of-a-kind creations in both metal and wood nearly disappeared."