This African American doll was manufactured in 1873 at a Springfield, Vermont, factory owned by Joel A.H. Ellis, a Vermont inventor and toy maker. By the 1850s, Ellis’ Vermont Novelty Works company, manufactured a variety of wooden toys, including popular wheeled “cabs”, or baby carriages. These successes inspired Ellis to form Co-Operative Manufacturing, a separate company devoted to manufacturing dolls on an industrial scale. In 1873, Ellis patented a mortise and tenon design for making a jointed, wooden doll’s body of rock maple with poseable arms and legs. Men ran the lathes and other machinery; female workers assembled the dolls and painted the heads, hair, and facial features. Ellis closed his doll factory after only one year due to the Panic of 1873, a severe economic depression, making “Joel Ellis dolls” relatively rare.

The Co-operative Manufacturing Company made African American dolls like this one as a special order. Lucy Emerine Amidon Henry (1843-1927) dressed the doll in a black velvet jacket with matching trousers. Joel Ellis’s innovative jointed design enabled the doll to bend at the waist and knees to sit in a chair made by Lucy’s uncle, “Sol” Amidon, Jr. (1803-1892) of Deerfield.