Do you remember your favorite toy? Chances are it was made in New Jersey.
New Jersey was a pioneering center for the toy industry and was home to more than 50 different companies that produced everything from tinplate toys to model trains, to a host of dolls, including Raggedy Anne and Andy, made by the Knickerbocker Toy Company of Middlesex.
This little-known but extensive aspect of Garden State history is being celebrated at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, with its latest exhibition, “Toy World,” spotlighting the tale of toy manufacturing in our state. The exhibition runs through Sunday, April 30, 2017, in the museum’s Riverside Gallery.
Showcasing more than 100 toys made here between 1880 and the late 1960s, “Toy World” features such favorites as Colorforms playsets, the Suzy Homemaker oven, and those plastic green World War II Army men that seemed to be everywhere years ago.
On view are numerous dolls made at the “World’s Largest Doll House,” the Horsman Doll Factory in Trenton. Courtland Toys of Camden, Mantua Toys or Tyco of Woodbury Heights, Newark’s Remco, and the obscure Hopewell company Hoproco are also included.
“You can’t come here and see Barbie or G.I. Joe, but you can see toys made by 50 different New Jersey companies,” says Nick Ciotola, curator of cultural history at the NJSM. “We wanted to do something a little more lighthearted. We wanted to tell real stories of New Jersey.”
He explains that, because New Jersey is in the most populated part of the country and has a vast transportation network, it was perfectly situated to make the toys and then quickly distribute them to various markets.
In addition to the historic toys on display, the exhibition includes an interactive play area, a “wall of fame” for toys (all with a Jersey connection), and a place to remember and write about favorite childhood toys. There is also a 1950s-style “living room,” where you can sit on a carrot-colored couch and watch a loop of old toy commercials on a vintage Motorola television.
The trek through the toys starts with the Hall of Toy Innovations display, just outside the doors of the Riverside Gallery. Each case tells a story of an innovative toy that came out of New Jersey and had a national impact, for example, the Flexible Flyer sled.
“The revolution or innovation in this case was the idea, ‘let’s make a sled you can actually steer,’ which was a step up from a toboggan,” Ciotola says. “This was invented by Samuel Allen, a man who had an agricultural supply business in Philadelphia, which kept him busy in the spring, summer, and fall, but not in the winter.”
“He was (puttering around) his family’s property in Moorestown, Burlington County, and realized that in the winter, his company could sell sleds,” Ciotola adds. “So (the Flexible Flyer) was developed in 1889; Allen gets a patent, starts producing the sleds, and they’re made for more than 100 years.”
From Asbury Park, we got an assortment of practical joke toys made by the S.S. Adams Company, which actually started in Asbury Park but became so successful that it moved to a larger facility in nearby Neptune.
Things like “fly-in-the-ice-cube,” black soap, fake mustaches, snake-in-the-can, and, most famously, the handshake-buzzer called the Joy Buzzer, came from the fertile mind of Sam (Soren) Adams.
“Adams’ business existed for about 100 years,” he adds. “It started at the turn of 20th century, then it was run by his descendants, and it went on almost through the year 2000.”
The story of the American model train also has its beginnings in New Jersey, as Ciotola explains that the Lionel corporation began in our state around 1900.
“But before Lionel there was Eugene Beggs in Paterson, who in 1889 created the first model trains produced in this country,” Ciotola says.
Interestingly, like a real train, Beggs’ toy train is powered by a steam boiler, but in miniature.
One very rare toy in the exhibit — a 19th century “talking” doll — was invented by Thomas Edison. Although the porcelain face and body were made in Germany, the tiny phonograph inside the doll, which plays a snippet of a nursery rhyme, was made in Edison’s factories in West Orange.
An especially fun item on view is the circa 1960 Movieland Drive-In by Remco of Newark. Inspired by the first drive-in movie theater, which opened in Camden in the 1930s, this example happened to be “showing” “Have Gun, Will Travel” as the feature, along with Captain Kangaroo and Heckle & Jeckle cartoons.
Many more toys are arranged inside the gallery in the kind of “toy window” people of a certain age might remember. Long, long before the Internet, and even before holiday catalogs, the must-have toys were displayed in festive department store windows.
“Around the holiday season the stores would create these elaborate toy windows, and you’d go downtown and look at the display,” Ciotola says.
A specific Princeton connection in the exhibit would be Creative Playthings, a company founded in New York in the mid-20th century by toy designer, author, educator, philanthropist, and advocate of early childhood development Robert Caplan; the company then re-located to the outskirts of Princeton.
Both Robert and his equally accomplished wife, Theresa, settled in Princeton and lived their lives there — Robert died in 1988, and Theresa died in 2010 at the age of 96.
In the exhibit there is a sturdy marble and wood race toy, a perfect example of how Caplan wanted to encourage non-violent imaginative play, without any strict rules. The use of wood in the 1950s and ’60s was also a bit radical, since plastics were everywhere.
We also see a handful of intriguing but simple finger puppets of different ethnicities and international costumes, another example of how Creative Playthings wished to teach tolerance and support awareness of diversity.
Sadly, all of the New Jersey manufacturers showcased in “Toy World” are gone from our state. They went out of business or were absorbed by huge multi-national corporations, Ciotola says.
The Garden State is still an important center for the toy industry insofar as the international headquarters of Toys R Us is located in Wayne, however.
And, New Jersey continues to be home to quite a few toy companies, including Reeves International of Pequannock; Alex Brands of Fairfield; International Playthings of Parsippany; Blue Box Toys USA in Livingston; and the Maplewood-based Brer Rabbit Toys, to name a few.
Toy World, New Jersey State Museum, 205 West State Street, Trenton. Through April 30, 2017. Museum hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Suggested admission $5. (609) 292-6464 or statemuseum.nj.gov.
The country’s first model trains were produced in Paterson,and Lionel also had its start in the Garden State.,
