Highlights Archives
Historical Museum's Doll Collection Goes Online
In the early 20th century doll collecting became a popular hobby among women, so it is not surprising that the Wisconsin Historical Museum acquired its first doll from a female donor in 1913. Since then the museum has collected almost 1,200 more dolls. For decades the museum staff kept many of them on display in the basement of the headquarters building, where they were tremendously popular, especially among girls. In 1986 the museum moved to its new location on Madison's Capitol Square and the dolls returned to storage. The dolls are finally on view again, but this time on the Wisconsin Historical Museum's online collection Web site.
Two centuries of doll history are represented by the collection, which includes everything from fashionably dressed wooden dolls of the 18th century to the American Girl doll Nellie, who appeared in 2001. To see the dolls, a visitor to the online tour can flip through images of the whole collection or tour them by category, country and manufacturer, decade of manufacture, materials, or collector.
Over the years the museum has had six major collections of dolls donated. Usually doll collectors put together the collection during their adult years and then left it to the museum in their will. Others saved dolls from their childhood and donated them later in life. The most important of these collections is the one put together by Alice Kent Trimpey (1864-1949) of Baraboo, Wisconsin. Alice was one of the first significant doll collectors in the United States, and she wrote two books about her collection, The Story of My Dolls (1935) and Becky, My First Love (1946).
While Wisconsin girls played with many of the dolls, others were made by Wisconsinites. The latter includes mores than 50 dolls made by the Milwaukee Handicraft Project during the Depression, 29 dolls produced at the request of the museum by students from the University of Wisconsin's Home Economics Department to represent fashion history, and 41 dolls representing prominent Wisconsin women made by Joan Beringer Pripps of Milwaukee for Wisconsin's state centennial in 1948.
The online collection of museum dolls would not have been possible without the help of the Madison Area Doll Club, especially members Gloria Laundrie, Margaret Hendricks, and Karen Field, who have spent the last eight years cataloging the dolls into the museum's cataloging software and photographing each one. The museum staff is greatly indebted to their dedication and hard work.
:: Posted December 28, 2007
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