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The Hail to the Sunrise memorial at Mohawk Park in Charlemont on a sunny spring afternoon. The bronze statue of a Native warrior with arms uplifted stands in the middle distance behind a low circular ring of about a hundred inscribed stones around a small reflecting pool, with a stone walkway in the foreground, a wooden interpretive sign and U.S. flag to the left, a tall Christmas-tree-shaped conifer to the right, and the wooded ridge of the Deerfield River valley rising under a partly cloudy sky behind.
Things to See · Historic Site
Hail to the Sunrise statue, Mohawk Park, Charlemont, May 2012. Photo by Doug Kerr, source, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Hail to the Sunrise

Charlemont, Franklin County

Category
Historic Site
Town
Charlemont
County
Franklin
Admission
Free; outdoor monument open at all times

Hail to the Sunrise is a 1932 bronze statue of a Native warrior with arms uplifted, standing at Mohawk Park along Route 2 (the Mohawk Trail) east of Charlemont Center. The figure faces east toward the rising sun, and an arrowhead-shaped tablet at the base carries the inscription “Hail to the Sunrise: In Memory of the Mohawk Indian.”

The statue was sculpted by Joseph Pollia and dedicated on October 1, 1932, commissioned by the Improved Order of Red Men, a white fraternal organization, as a memorial to the Native peoples of the Mohawk Trail region. More than 2,000 people attended the dedication.

What to see

  • The statue: a bronze figure on a large boulder pedestal, arms raised eastward.
  • The reflecting pool: directly in front of the statue, ringed with about a hundred inscribed stones contributed by Red Men councils and the Degree of Pocahontas auxiliary from across the country.
  • The walkway: flagstone paving around the pool incorporates additional inscribed memorial stones for individual members of the order.
  • The setting: a small landscaped roadside park on the south side of Route 2, with the wooded ridges of the Deerfield River valley rising behind.

A note on framing

The monument is a 1930s fraternal-order memorial, not a depiction of any specific historical figure or community. Its inscription addresses “the Mohawk Indian,” but the area was historically inhabited by the Pocumtuck to the east and the Mohican to the west, with seasonal Mohawk presence further west along the trail. The actual Native communities of the region are addressed in contemporary interpretive material at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield and at the Mohawk Trail State Forest to the west.

Visiting

Mohawk Park is a roadside pull-off on the south side of Route 2, about a mile and a half east of Charlemont Center. There is a small gravel parking lot, a few picnic tables, and an interpretive sign; the grounds are open to the public year-round at no charge. The annual Red Men parade and ceremony is held at the site each summer.

Sources