Vermont man builds middle finger statue to get back at small government

Visitors to the small town of Westford, Vermont this winter can enjoy the sight of Christmas lights, snow … and a 20-foot-high middle finger statue.

Ted Pelkey of Westford wants to bring his truck repair business to the 11-acre property on which his house sits. It’s a goal he has been working toward for a decade.

“I want to put it on my property at my house and work right from there, so I can walk out and go to work,” he told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson.

However, over the last ten years, Pelkey has not been able to get the town to grant him the required permit for the move, despite the fact that his home property is commercially zoned and that the town encourages commercial development. The inability get a permit is not due to ordinances, he said, but to small town corruption and favorites — or un-favorites — games.

“It’s more of a, ‘We don’t like you’ type of situation than whether it meets the rules or not,” he said. “We’ve already proven it meets the rules, we’ve won in court … Small town government, when people don’t like you, when you’ve got one person on the board who hates you, and he tells you he hates you — right there in the public eye, recorded and everything — what kind of an honest shake are you going to get out of a development review board?”

Fed up with this treatment, Pelkey decided to take matters into his own hands — or rather, into a giant wooden one. He paid a woodcarver to create a 7-foot-tall hand with its middle finger sticking up, and then mounted the hand on a 16-foot pole on his property.

“I put it out there to make a statement to the town, because you could scream at them what that finger sort of means, and they wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t hear you,” he said. “I think they hear the finger out there.”

What’s more, Pelkey put lighting on the pole so that the middle finger statue glows at night, clearly visible to everyone passing by on the highway.

“It’s beautiful,” he laughed. “It’s like the North Star is shining out there.”

The brazen piece of artwork has gained a reputation. Pelkey said that hundreds of tourists have been coming from all over New England to look at the infamous middle finger statue.

“I’ve heard no negatives on it … I believe there’s more love for the finger than hate, by far,” he chuckled.

What do Pelkey’s wife and (grown) children think of a giant middle finger statue on their dad’s land?

“Dad has always taught them to stick up for their stuff, their rights, if they think they’re getting wronged,” he said. “Yeah, my family supports it.”

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