Below are the descriptions of two types of rag dolls made by the South during the Civil War. The first is a rag doll made from the remnants of a rag carpet. The second dolls described is made from newspaper.
Rag Dolls May Become Industry
Hundreds of people passed it by and took no notice of it, and yet other hundreds looked upon it. It was on exhibition at the State Fair. It attracted may attention just because it was just what it was – a rag doll.
If carried me back to the old war times when the North part of the country was as far from the South as the sunrise is from the sunset.
All the China dolls and all of the fancifully arrayed dolls were then on the North side of the line and the pickets did not allow any of that kind to get across the lines, but the Southern babies, and I was one of them then, had to have dolls, and our Confederate mothers improvised them for us.
They made rag dolls, and they had thousands of ways of making them.
I had one once that was made of the remnants of a rag carpet, with an old pewter spoon as a basis.
After the war the Northern mothers saw some of the Southern rag dolls, and as curious as it may seem, the fact remains that the Southern rag doll attracted the attention of the Yankee babies more than did the China dolls of the then prosperous North.
Children are children, the world over, especially in this American part of the world, and somehow the rag doll suits the average child better than does the fanciful colored China doll.
Mrs. C.H. Moncure, of Orange, Va., made the rag doll that was on exhibition at the State Fair, a doll that attracted the attention of a lot of old-timers who knew about the rag dolls of the Confederate times.
This rag doll made by Mrs. Moncure was especially attractive to me because its head and its bust, and it may be said its whole body, was made out of a copy of The Times-Dispatch [newspaper]. Somehow Mrs. Moncure discovered a process by which she uses the paper in a Times-Dispatch issue, say of the Sunday variety, to make a head and a bust for a rag doll.
The balance of the work is done with her own hand, and a lot of artistic work it is.
In the first place the [newspaper] is made into a kind of paper mash, or pulp, and when that is dried out a lot of painting has to be done, and finally the “baby” comes forth in gorgeous array.
The dressing is on the rag doll order, and at last the doll comes to the front in marvelous perfection.
I do not know that Mrs. Moncure has a patent on the process, but she ought to get it and go into the rag doll making business.
Source: The times dispatch. (Richmond, Va.), 15 Oct. 1911.
