Painted Post is a village of monuments, and North Hamilton is a street of monuments.

Some communities do this deliberately – gathering their various unrelated statues, plaques, boulders, and horseback-riding generals from their original sites into one location. In Painted Post, it seems to have grown more or less organically. And that has fortuitously created a nice, comfortable walking loop.

The most obvious, of course, of course, and surely the best known, is the 1951 “Chief Montour” statue that has become a symbol of the village. This harks back to the original “painted post” which gave its name to the whole region. It anchors a knot of monuments at Water and Hamilton Streets, close by the Village Square shopping center.

Last week in this space we looked at Painted Post monuments relating to the Native peoples of the region, so this week we’ll just summarize them, and concentrate on the OTHER monuments. In addition to the statue itself, the BASE of the statue bears a large and lengthy plaque, giving the history of the original “painted post,” and the three 19th-century “Indians” that preceded the current statue.

Right nearby is a 1966 plaque commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Painted Post, which more-or-less stabilized arrangements between the Iroquois and the U.S. (Guess who came out best.)

Also nearby are two plaques celebrating the Village recovery from the catastrophic “Hurricane Agnes” flood of 1972. The whole Village Square center occupies a neighborhood that had to be demolished – it’s remarkable that the community came back as it did. The NYS Urban Development Corporation dedicated one plaque to “Painted Post and its citizens in recognition of their courageous and determined recovery… may the Village enjoy a long and prosperous future.” The other plaque is FROM the citizens, “to all the people and organizations, far and near, who unselfishly gave of themselves to assist the Village in its hour of greatest need.”

The next knot of monuments starts at the post office, and spills over both sides of Chemung Street and the railroad tracks. The post office lobby, as we saw last week, includes a New Deal mural of an imaginary event from Seneca days.

Painted Post has two fully-rounded statues in close proximity, which may be unusual among communities of similar size. Besides the Chief Montour statue down the street, we find a Civil War soldier on the post office grounds. This monument “to the soldier dead of the Town of Erwin” was dedicated in the 50th anniversary year of Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Two small cannon nearby are the focal point of Memorial Day observances.

Cross the tracks to the hard-to-notice World War Memorial Park, dedicated in 1930 (that’s World War ONE), but not comprising much more than a plaque, a mortar, and a flagpole. Across Hamilton is the sesquicentennial marker for the Sullivan expedition (invasion) during the Revolution.

Walk on up to Pulteney Street, turn left, and (once things are open again) cross Pulteney at Steuben to the Painted Post-Erwin Museum at the Depot. Here you can find all three of the “Indian” monuments that preceded today’s statue.

Cross back over on Steuben to the Village office building, and the first thing you’ll see is a memorial for deceased fire fighters, going back to 1867. Behind that, more powerful for being understated and unostentatious, is a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001.

Walk south to Chemung, take a left, and look at the bell in its little tower. The bell rang out from the Methodist church on the spot, demolished after 1972 and now part of the nearby United Church – a union of congregations, since the Presbyterian church was wrecked at the same time.

Go into the shopping center and find the gazebo in the middle. This Centennial Pavilion went up in 1993 to mark a hundred years of incorporation as a Village.

Keep headin’ south, and cross Water Street into Hodgman Park. At the lacrosse field is a touching memorial to former player Michael Joseph Tammaro, 1989-2016. And finally, just a few steps away, check out the James A. Hogue memorial scoreboard. Are there any monuments that we missed?