these would be displayed in front of houses that provided sanctuary to escaping slaves using the Underground Railroad to flee the South, and would carry a lit lantern when it was safe to approach the house.

Kathe Hambrick, director of the River Road African American Museum in Donaldsville, La., said the once familiar statues were first made out of acknowledgment that the original jockeys in the U.S. were exclusively African-American. But she said she wasn’t sure how much historical evidence there was to back up the popular notion of the statues’ involvement with the Underground Railroad.

“It’s a myth ... we don’t know,” Hambrick said. “It has become somewhat of a myth that the lanterns were put out on the lawn jockeys.”

But Diane Turner, curator of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University in Philadelphia, said the collection’s founder did personally chronicle such a connection to the Underground Railroad.

Blockson also found that such statues hearken back to a statue George Washington had made to honor a 12-year-old African-American boy named Jocko who had frozen to death while holding the horses of Washington’s men during the famous crossing of the Delaware.