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Armand Marseille Dolls
The Armand Marseille porcelain factory made doll heads in Koppelsdorf from 1885, when Marseille bought the Liebennann & Wegescher porcelain factory, until 1949, when Hermann Marseille moved to West Germany.
The Marseille factory was one of the largest in the German toy industry, employing at one time over 800 people and operating ten kilns. Hundreds of workers individually dressed the dolls to reflect the special needs and orders of importers all [...] Click here to continue reading.
Skookum Indian Dolls
Made by a variety of companies from 1913 to circa 1960, Skookum dolls depicted Native American Indians in a variety of sizes and clothing. The principal manufacturer, the H.H. Tammen Company of Los Angeles, California, provided authentic costumes of the Siwash Indians living in the northwestern United States. Besides elaborate clothing ranging from feathered headdress to leather moccasins, the features of the dolls were colored with a yellowish-brown earth pigment called [...] Click here to continue reading.
Early American Cloth Dolls
The early American cloth dolls demonstrated the ingenuity and creativity of many settler families. When both money and material goods were scarce, it was not unusual for a mother to make a doll for her child by simply knotting whatever fabric scraps she could find.
If a corncob was available, it became the doll body. Fabric scraps were used for the arms and legs and clothing. As materials became more [...] Click here to continue reading.
Schoenhut Toy Company
Albert Schoenhut immigrated to the United States near the end of the American Civil War and began operations as a toy manufacturer in Philadelphia in 1872. Frequently linked to early composition Rolly Dollys and wooden toy pianos, the name Schoenhut is most synonymous with the wooden articulated Humpty Dumpty Circus figures made from 1903 to 1935.
Schoenhut’s first circus set was a simple ladder, chair and clown combination. Many different [...] Click here to continue reading.
Whitney Reed
According to information on antiquetoys.com, Whitney S. Reed founded the W.S. Reed Toy Company in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1875, for the purpose of making lithographed paper-on-wood toys and construction sets. They also had a patent on one mechanical bank, “The old Lady in the Shoe”, and were in business until 1897.
Autoperipatetikos
An Autoperipatetikos, or Autoperipatikos, is a doll who walks by means of a clockwork mechanism (originally patented by Enoch Rice Morrison on July 15, 1862) which causes her feet, usually made of pressed metal, to move back and forth. The dolls were made in Germany, France and America, and are supposedly the first mechanical toy patented in America of which there are still existing examples.
Psyche Paper Dolls
In the early 1800′s, the latest Parisian fashions were circulated to other countries as colored engravings in fashion magazines. In the 1830′s, Journal de Modes decided the one-dimensional magazine images could be improved upon and produced a paper doll named “Psyche”, along with two-sided hats and clothing, which could be seen from the front or the back. For the next forty years, she was the number one paper doll in the [...] Click here to continue reading.
Kathy Kruse – Early 20th Century German Doll Maker
In Germany, 1910, Kathe Kruse began her successful doll business with the use of a simple potato. As mother of seven children, she pleased her daughter by fashioning a doll using a potato for a head with features drawn on with a burned match and sand-filled toweling for the body. Amazingly, by 1910, Kruse had sufficiently polished her doll making efforts to attract orders from [...] Click here to continue reading.
Door of Hope Mission Dolls
By Thomas P. Heinecke, Ohio p4A.com representative
Carved pear wood dolls with hand-painted details dressed mostly in period Chinese working class garb, originating from the Door of Hope Christian Mission in Shanghai, China, about 1900 to 1935.
The Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai was established around 1900 with the goal of providing young underprivileged women and girls the marketable skills necessary to support themselves. Some of [...] Click here to continue reading.
Biedermeier Style
The unpretentious and elegant Biedermeier style of furniture and accessories originated in Germany, circa 1820, and was popular there and in Austria until the mid-1840′s. It greatly simplified earlier French Empire lines into a classical architectural look that was also popular in eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and to some extent in France itself. A darker mahogany look was favored in the more northern European regions while the lighter hues of ash, birch, elm [...] Click here to continue reading.
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