Folk Dolls & Memory
In museum work, I’ve found that the smallest objects often make the biggest impact. Among them, dolls have a unique power. Whether porcelain, cloth, wooden, or made from corn husks, dolls speak across generations.
They’re familiar and intimate. Most people have had one, held one, or remember one. That personal connection makes them perfect for helping visitors feel at home in history.
Too often, dolls are tucked into the corners of historic house tours—set on a nursery shelf or used in hands-on crafts for kids. They're acknowledged with a simple, “They had dolls back then.” But dolls deserve more. They’re not just toys—they’re cultural touchstones, shaped by the materials, values, and hands of the people who made them. Especially in their handmade forms, dolls are tools of memory and identity.
Dolls have been part of our story for thousands of years. The earliest known examples, from Ancient Egypt (around 2000 BCE), were flat wooden figures buried with the dead—likely part ritual, part play (Jaffe, 1966). In Classical Greece and Rome, children played with terracotta dolls, and Roman girls would dedicate their dolls to Venus when they got married. Even the word pupa—Latin for both “girl” and “doll”—shows how deeply dolls were tied to personhood.
Over time, sacred figures and idols became playthings. In England, people made “corn dollies” from the last sheaves of wheat to honor the spirit of the harvest. These ritual objects eventually became toys in children’s hands—simple, familiar, and deeply rooted in place (Lavitt, 1983).
By the Middle Ages, dolls were sold at fairs in Florence and Venice, and German towns like Nuremberg and Sonneberg became major doll-making centers. By the 17th century, Nuremberg alone had at least seventeen professional dollmakers (Lavitt, 1983, pp. 10–11). These were often handmade dolls—wooden or clay, painted and clothed in miniature fashions.
Bartholomew baby
As trade expanded, dolls spread globally. English “Bartholomew babies”—small wooden dolls—were sold on street corners and shipped to the American colonies. In 1585, painter John White even sketched an Indigenous girl holding one (Lavitt, 1983, p. 10). Meanwhile, colonists made dolls from whatever they had: rags, apples, scraps of corn husk. These were not just substitutes for store-bought toys—they were creative, personal, and filled with meaning (Lavitt, 1982, p. 92).
The Industrial Revolution changed everything. In the 1800s, towns like Sonneberg were producing 15 million dolls a year (Jaffe, 1966, p. 127). This wasn’t factory work as we know it today. Instead, it was a network of small workshops and home-based makers—each person doing one task: shaping heads, stitching bodies, painting faces, sewing clothes (Acker, 1902, p. 72). Dolls were no longer individual creations but standardized goods, mass-produced and shipped across continents.
Still, handmade dolls never disappeared. In fact, they thrived—especially in places where money was tight or tradition mattered. In Shaker communities, faceless cloth dolls reflected spiritual beliefs. African American families sewed rag dolls with charms and ancestral symbols. In Appalachia, children learned to make corn husk dolls as part of seasonal rhythms. Across the Americas, Native communities made cradleboard dolls that carried both cultural knowledge and comfort.
These folk dolls weren’t just playthings. They were stories—stitched, carved, and passed down.
As curators and educators, we often look for objects that help people connect to the past in a personal way. Dolls do that. They are small enough to hold, but they carry big stories—about gender, race, class, memory, family, survival.
In a world of plastic and screens, folk dolls remind us of slower ways of living. They show what people valued, what they had at hand, and what they passed on to their children. They are material culture in the truest sense—made by people, shaped by place, and full of life.
So next time you see a doll in a museum, don’t overlook it. Look closer. It might just be the most human thing in the room.
References
Acker, M. E. (1902). Home made dolls for the children. Harper’s Bazaar, 36(1), 72.
Jaffe, N. (1966). The history of toys: From antiquity to the present. New York, NY: Bramhall House.
Lavitt, W. (1982). American folk dolls. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Lavitt, W. (1983). The Knopf collectors’ guides to American antiques: Dolls. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
