Toy story

Mady Hudgins plays with a vintage doll on display at Magnolia Grange. Mady is a student at Stockton Learning Center. Page Dowdy/Chesterfield Observer No matter the state of the economy, one thing is for sure: Children will have toys this Christmas. Perhaps a sign of our country getting back to basics, Toys “R” Us reports a trend toward “nostalgia” toys this year. “Many parents are increasingly looking to introduce their little ones to toys they cherished when they were children. Whether in its original form or an updated version of an old favorite, many toys of yesteryear are back again, bringing fun and smiles to a whole new generation of kids,” reads a recent Toys “R” Us press release.

See if you recognize any of your favorite toys below.

Toys in Colonial America

In early America, when people had only the necessities of everyday life, clever and thrifty parents and grandparents would stash away bits and pieces of leftover supplies, which would come to life in the form of a Christmas toy. Fathers and grandfathers carved toys for their children out of scrap wood. Whistles, boats and even dolls were made from wood. Mothers and grandmothers made toys out of fabric scraps, primarily dolls, for their daughters. Using arms and legs carved by the men, they would stuff cloth bodies with sawdust, straw and bran and sew clothing directly onto the doll. Doll faces were of women, not babies, and were embroidered, penciled or stenciled on.

This doll on display at Magnolia Grange is porcelain and dates back to the 1800s. Photo courtesy of Diane Dallmeyer Carpenters used their scraps to make toys to sell to supplement their incomes. Items like the Bilbo catcher, commonly known as the cup-and-ball toy, entertained 18th-century children as they flipped the ball, attached by a string, into the cup. A whirligig, a simple whirling toy made with an object suspended from looped strings, entertained children early in America’s history. Jacobs Ladders and Ninepins were also wooden toys made by relatively simple carving. Jacobs Ladders were blocks of wood connected vertically by ribbons. When held by the end of the string, the blocks flipped over, appearing to tumble or cascade downward, and Ninepins were brought over to America in the 1600s by Dutch settlers.

This turn-of-the-century French doll was donated to Magnolia Grange by Chester resident Mildred Daffron, whose grandparents owned the plantation home. The face, hands and feet of the doll are porcelain and the body is made of cloth. Page Dowdy/Chesterfield Observer Tops, a universal and timeless toy, have been discovered in ancient Egyptian burial places and in all cultures. Early tops were made of clay or wood, and tops made of plastic or metal can still be found in toy shops today.

The game of Graces was a late 17th- and early 18th-century pastime, mainly for girls. Played with a hoop decorated with ribbons, the object was to send the hoop whirling on the ground toward another player who would then try to catch it with her stick. Boys were sometimes allowed to join in the fun, but they took their hoops more seriously as a game of speed and coordination, racing them along, using the sticks to keep the hoops upright.

Peg games, similar to those on the tables at Cracker Barrel restaurants, have been popular since Colonial days. Carved out of wood with small pegs that fit into holes, several different games such as Fox & Geese, Solitaire and Nine Men’s Morris were popular especially in early American taverns.

Victorian America

The 1800s brought commercially manufactured toys to America, presenting new Christmas possibilities to children. Chesterfield was still an agricultural county at the turn of the century, and all hands were needed on the farm, but when they had extra time, the natural creativity and imagination inherent in children provided them with entertainment ideas from whatever scraps were at hand. A broken piece of fencing could become a sword or a bridge. Scraps of yarn were slingshots or dolls’ hair. Corncobs became dolls, and a blanket was totally capable of becoming a magic carpet! As the community grew and transportation became available to Richmond and Petersburg, metropolitan shopping areas developed, and people began going to stores to shop. In the last quarter of the century, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck offered parents the option of shopping by catalog.

Still, in Victorian days, toys were precious, and Christmas wasn’t about kids the way it is today. In fact, gift-giving was not the focal point of the holiday, and when gifts were exchanged, frequently children were not included in the exchange. When they were, it was more often a part of wealthier families’ traditions.

Wooden toys

The new era of transportation in 19thcentury America brought steamboats to the rivers and trains to the flats, and in Chesterfield, sleds, sleighs and horse-drawn carriages transported people throughout the county. Skating on Jahnke Lake was a popular winter exercise mid-century. Toys reflected real life with trains, boats, fire trucks, sleighs and carriages available in metal or wood. Skates were thin blades strapped to the foot of the child.

Toy animals have always fascinated children, and long before dinosaurs became the reptile of choice, Victorian children collected farm animals as well as exotic circus animals. Pull-toy animals, animals mounted on wheeled platforms, delighted the very young. Horses were the most common pulled toy. Just as today, fire trucks were the choice of little boys.

Nesting blocks and building blocks were a source of fun for kids. Nesting blocks were painted with themes like a circus; once a child separated the blocks from inside one another, he would end up with all the circus animals. Today, we would call building blocks a method of developing a child’s motor skills. In Victorian days they were just fun. Decorated by letters, numbers or pictures, when assembled, they would become anything from a puzzle to a castle, a word or a fort.

Noah’s Arks were popular in Europe, and this trend made it across the Atlantic with local carvers and carpenters finding a challenge in creating the big wooden ark with the pairs of animals that lodged inside.

Dolls

One of the largest and most revealing toy categories in Victorian days was dolls. Dolls provide us today with a unique view of how people lived in the past. The clothing reveals the changes in fashion throughout the eras. Homemade clothing reflects the everyday simple patterns that were copied from fashion magazines and modified to fit the reality of the family. Made of fabric scraps pieced together, homemade clothing shows the importance of frugality over fashion. Some families had a seamstress who would also make clothing for the dolls, and sometimes a doll-maker would hire a professional dressmaker to clothe his dolls. Materials and patterns were also “farmed out” in bulk, creating a home industry of doll clothing-making.

Crude doll clothing made by children shows us the creative training given children in the past. The condition of the dolls and clothing that are found reveals how they were cared for. “Memoirs of a Doll,” published in 1853 states, “If we look close, yes, very close, the doll is the pivot of humanity; such as are the little girls of one period with their dolls, such will be the woman of a few years later.” Prior to the 20th century, a woman’s future was marriage, and a girl’s education was the preparation for that marriage and for home-making. Dressmaking and knowledge of fashion were aspects of a girl’s education. In Colonial Williamsburg today, we can see a large collection of 18th-century dolls made of wooden or wax shoulders, heads and limbs with homespun linen bodies. Wealthier families could provide the most elaborate dolls but the average working-class family would buy an unclothed doll and dress it at home. One of the most elaborate, fanciest and most expensive toys in Victorian days was the dollhouse. Miniature furniture filled the rooms, and some houses even had plumbing and electric lights!

Board games

The first board game was called The Checkered Game of Life. Mr. Milton Bradley made the game by hand in 1860, and by 1861 he had sold 45,000 copies. The squares on the game board each represented a social virtue or vice, with the former earning a player points and the latter retarding his progress. The player who first accumulated 100 points won the game.

In Victorian days, dice were associated with gambling and seldom used in table games. Instead, a teetotum was used. A top with numbers on the sides, it was spun and the number ending up on top determined the number of spaces a player would move. Victorian parents weren’t as interested in the entertainment of their kids as in education and enlightenment, and morality games were intended to improve children’s character. Snakes and Ladders featured pictures on squares of children doing good deeds; landing on those squares entitled players to move ahead. The snake squares had pictures of children being disobedient, and the player who landed on them had to go back a few spaces. History, literature and science were the themes of games such as Geographical Lotto and Picture Lotto, and Familiar Objects was the name of a game intended to teach young children their words and sounds.

Schoolyard games

Most of us remember the days of outdoor fun, and children in Victorian America enjoyed outside games such as jacks and marbles. Lutz, ollies, aggies, swirls and catseyes are some of the marvelous names for marbles, a game that is almost a lost art in 21st-century America. But almost any grandfather can tell today’s kids about his favorite schoolyard game. Made of clay or pottery in colonial days, and later of glass, most kids had a variety of marbles in their collections as a result of trading, winning or losing in playing. While their male counterparts were occupied with marbles during recess, girls played jacks. A challenge of speed and dexterity, players tossed a handful of the six-pronged jacks on the ground. Other players took turns tossing a jack into the air, picking up another from the ground, and then catching the jack (or later, a rubber ball) before it came back down. In the next round, the player would try to pick up two jacks, then three and so on. Missing either the jacks or the ball ended the player’s turn.

Mechanical toys

Automata is the name for toys with parts that moved independently. The toymaker who could construct automata was a skilled one, indeed. Some of these toys used mechanisms similar to clocks. Winding a key made a horse walk, a bear rise on his hind legs or a boy row a boat. Sand toys were driven by a wheel hidden behind a wall of sand. As the sand was shaken, it turned the wheel, which in turn made the figure in the flat wooden, glass-fronted box move. Some cast-iron toys are found today, such as kids’ banks that made saving pennies fun when the clown stood on his head upon insertion of money.

By the year 1900, toy shops were common in America. Imports were abundant, and competition was fierce. Inventions such as electricity and automobiles presented opportunities for more themes and more advanced construction. The toy business was off and growing.