Adirondack History: How Dolls Are Made

"How Dolls Are Made"

March 21, 1907--Many big things are needed to make a small doll. She has her beginning in a great trough, where workmen knead up into a dingy paste old cardboard, even old gloves, old rags and gum tragacanth. They are great brawny fellows, these men, naked to the waist, wearing leathern aprons. In an adjoining room the paste is poured into molds for the bust, the arms, the legs of the dolls innumerable.

There is a special machine for stamping out the hands. I should not like to confess how long I stood in front of it, fascinated by the steady stream of queer little hands that fell ceaselessly from the iron monster. It was awful, uncanny, hypnotizing. Indeed, the whole sight was grim and monstrous. The low factory rooms were misty with steam and lit by strange, red glowing fires. Always the great steel machines pulsed and changed, and through the mist sweaty giants of men went to and fro with heaps of little greenish arms and legs until you began to think that some new Herod had killed all the little people in the world.

Ticonderoga Sentinel

Aurora Ramsay works in the Brewster Research Library at the Adirondack History Center Museum in Elizabethtown.

ADIRONDACK HISTORY CENTER MUSEUM
ESSEX COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
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