Smithtown's Bull Statue Turns a Founding Story Into a Landmark

Smithtown has a wonderfully literal local symbol: the bull. The town’s history page tells the civic story behind the bronze statue of Whisper the Bull. Lawrence Smith Butler, a descendant of founder Richard Smith, proposed the statue in 1903 to sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey.

The casting was finished in 1923, but money was not raised then, so the statue sat outside the Brooklyn Museum and later in storage. In 1941, Butler renewed the effort, funds were raised for the move, and Rumsey’s heirs donated the statue to the town.

That backstory turns a familiar traffic-circle landmark into a lesson in how local legend, family memory, public fundraising, and civic branding became fused. Smithtown’s bull is not just decoration; it is the town explaining itself in bronze. Once you know that, the statue feels less like a roadside oddity and more like public shorthand for the whole founding story.

It also gives Smithtown a landmark that is easy to explain to a kid in the back seat: there is a bull because the town has long told a bull story about its beginning.