From Hunting Tools to Folk Art

 

QUESTION: My grandfather was an avid duck hunter. To help him catch his prey, he used decoys. Some of them were rather plain but one was fancier than the rest, painted in full color and detail. Since I always admired them, he left them to me when he passed away last year. I still admire them and would like to know a bit about decoy history. Also, I’d like to possibly add to the ones he left me. 

ANSWER: Collectible decoys run the gamut from fancy ones made by famous carvers to plainer ones made by hunters, themselves. It all depends on how much you can afford to spend and what type of decoy—there are several—you want to add to those from your grandfather. But before you consider purchasing any, it’s a good idea to consider their history.

Long before English colonists arrived in America, Native Americans used natural materials like mud, fowl carcasses, and bulrushes to create imitations of birds for hunting. Later, colonists began to copy this technique. These imitations, or decoys, successfully attracted live birds, which the hunters would then kill or capture.

But the decoys used by Native Americans weren’t the detailed ones known today. Instead, they were approximations of the form and plumage of the type of birds being hunted. Hunters would weave bullrush into the shape of a bird or form a duck out of clay and stretch the skins of previous kills over the form. Often, they would weave feathers into the decoy and painted the heads and necks to match the colors of type of birds being hunted.

When Europeans first colonized North America, wildfowl filled the skies. Unfortunately, early settlers watched the birds fly over but didn’t know how to get them. In Europe, fowling was a sport for the landed gentry. Since ordinary people didn't own land for hunting, they never learned how to do it. Their guns didn't have the range or accuracy to bag high-flying birds, plus they had no bird-dogs to fetch their kill. 

Colonists copied the Native American's hunting technique, placing groups of decoys, called "rigs," in estuaries and marshes to attract birds. They made their decoys in two basic forms—floaters and stickups. Floating decoys attracted swimming gamebirds, such as ducks, gulls, and swans.  

Typically, they carved the bodies from a solid piece of pine or cedar, then hollowed them out to make them lighter to carry. They carved the heads separately and attached them with wooden dowels. Once assembled, they painted the decoys to match the hunted fowl. They added weights to the bottom of each decoy so they would sit low in the water without flipping over. Hunters made stickups in similar fashion, but made them to represent shorebirds such as sandpiper with legs added and pushed into the muddy shore.

During the second half of the 19th century, demand for game birds and their feathers exploded. Railroads enabled the fowl to be shipped quickly to markets. Victorian millinery fashions made heavy use of decorative bird plumage. Manufacturers produced decoys by the thousands to meet the demand. There were no restrictions on hunting, and market hunters collectively killed thousands of birds a day.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, between the United States and Great Britain, acting on behalf of Canada, specifically protected migratory birds being decimated by over-hunting. It made it illegal to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill, or sell migratory birds. Plus the statute didn’t discriminate between live or dead birds and/or bird parts including feathers, eggs and nests.

Consequently, hunters had little need for thousands of decoys. In 1928, the U.S. Congress banned the hunting of shorebirds  Decoy carvers could still make and sell their products anywhere, but there was little need for them. By the 1950s, mass-produced plastic decoys eliminated the need for hand-carved decoys. And by 1960, hand-carved hunting decoys had become a tool of the past. Decoy carving had instead become a folk art. Many hunters discarded or burned their wooden decoys, which at the time seemed worthless. 

To make a decoy, a carver would form the general shape of the decoy’s body using a hatchet and then fine-tune it with a long drawknife. He or she—a few carvers enlisted the help of their wives—would create the head separately from a smaller block of wood using an axe, rather than a hatchet. Then the carver would whittle the head down with a jackknife and attach it to the body using nails or long spikes.

Finally, the carver would sand, prime, and paint the finished decoy in natural colors to lure fowl effectively. By the time of the Civil War, this technique had matured almost to an art form.

While carvers produced different species of decoys—duck, geese, shorebirds, and more, shorebird decoys tend to be more scarce.

Commercial hunters often owned hundreds of decoys, which they would set out in large numbers to attract as many birds as possible. As sport hunting became more prominent among the wealthy, some carvers began making fewer decoys but of higher quality for this new clientele. Sport hunters wanted decoys that were beautiful, not just useful. Eventually, some carvers began making decoys for purely decorative reasons.

Decoys varied in style from region to region, as the environment and species of a given area dictated their design. Decoys in Maine, for example, were often tougher and more rugged in order to withstand the rough waters of the area. Even within regions, decoy designs varied. Some makers built theirs to float, which would attract large fowl like ducks and geese. 

Another group of decoys included stationary “stickups,” which stood on legs in the ground. Still others were two-dimensional profiles also designed as stickups. Some of these stickups stood nearly four feet tall, and floating decoys could be just as long.

Duck decoys weren’t seen as collectors’ items until the 1960s. The market first started with small, niche groups of enthusiasts throughout the United States in the 1950s and 1960s who began collecting antique duck decoys. When Hal Sorenson of Burlington, Iowa, published a magazine called “The Decoy Collector’s Guide,” everything began to change.

Unusual poses (sleeping, swimming, and feeding) are more difficult to render. Such decoys are generally more valuable.

The list of carvers seemed endless, but some names stood out above the rest. Perhaps the most famous practitioner was Elmer Crowel, a masterful carver and painter who lived in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. His decoys generally had carved wings and glass eyes, and he often used a rasp to imitate feathers on the back of his decoys’ heads and on their breasts. In 2000, a preening Canada goose that he carved sold at an auction for $684,500, the current world record for a decoy.

Other notable carvers included Lathrop T. Holmes, who used a limited but expressive palette of colors. “Gus” Wilson’s attention to detail was almost unrivaled, while many of the approximately 10,000 decoys in 50 years made by the Ward Brothers of Maryland were purely decorative. Charles Perdew and his wife, Edna, were a team—he carved and she painted. And Ken Anger perfected the technique of using a rasp to make his decoys look soft and realistic.

In addition to hand-carved decoys, some of the high-quality decoys produced in late-19th-century factories are also highly collectible. The main factories included Mason, Victor, Dodge, Stevens, Peterson, Evans, and Reynolds. Most of these factories used either a duplicating lathe, an assembly line, or both.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 50,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "Colonial America" in the 2026 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

It's Your Turn

 

QUESTION: I’ve always loved playing board games. When I was a kid, my family would have game nights. Each member of my family take turns choosing the games we played. While we played more modern games, I’ve always been fascinated by antique board games. How did board games get their start? What were some of the more popular games in the 19th and early 20th centuries? If I were to collect old board games, which ones would be the best to collect?

ANSWER: Collecting board games can be fun. The shear number of games produced during nearly 100 years of game production offers a wide variety of games to collect. Many people who collect games collect the ones they played as children. It’s a great place to start.

People have been playing games since ancient Egypt. The Romans loved to bet and rolling dice was popular. By the Middle Ages, playing cards was all the rage. Games became more sophisticated by the 17th century, as backgammon caught on. The Industrial Revolution and the introduction of electricity enabled the middle class to have more free time and by the late 19th century, parlor games, especially board games. The reliable light source encouraged people to seek evening amusements.

One of the most popular of these amusements was the game of checkers. While the more elite were more inclined to play chess, everyone else played checkers, often while sitting out on the porch on a summer’s eve or around the pot-bellied stove in the local country store in winter. While commercial manufacturers produced checkerboards, those that collectors love most are the handmade versions of light and dark wood inlaid in a contrasting pattern. 

Much the same can be said of backgammon and Parcheesi boards, some of which were made of glass with the board design painted in reverse on the back. Many of the game boards were beautiful works of art, with bold designs and bright colors, featuring fanciful characters or outrageous cartoons, often based on nursery rhymes, fairy tales or stories plucked from the headlines.

The counters, playing pieces, that people used to play these games range from the plain wooden circles of checkers and backgammon to elaborately carved pieces of exotic woods, jade and other semiprecious stones, and ivory for chess.

Board games offer the greatest variety for collectors. Most board games involve a race to the finish between two or more players who move their pieces along a printed track at a rate determined by the throw of a pair of dice, the turn of a numbered spinner, or the selection of cards.

In the 16th century, the Italians played Goose, the earliest known board game. But it wasn’t until the 19th century that board games existed in greater numbers. From about 1870 to 1960, when watching television gained popularity, manufacturers produced thousands of board games for the market. Some didn’t quite make it out of the gate while others gained phenomenal success.

The Mansion of Happiness, a game with a religious theme, first appeared in 1843 and was still popular over 40 years later in the 1880s. Winning, based on the Puritan view that success could be achieved through Christian deeds and goodness, required players to advance by landing on spaces denoting virtues like piety and humility and move backward when landing on spaces like cruelty and ingratitude. 

In 1860, The Checkered Game of Life rewarded players for mundane activities such as attending college, marrying, and getting rich. Daily life rather than eternal life became the focus of board games. The game was the first to focus on secular virtues rather than religious virtues, and sold 40,000 copies its first year.

By the 1880s, many games had a rags-to-riches theme. In Game of the District Messenger Boy, players are rewarded for landing on spots with attributes like accuracy and neatness and deducted for loitering.

Most games originated in New York City, as it was the center of the board game industry. The Game of Playing Department Store from 1898 showed what a novel concept it was for Americans to do all their shopping under one roof. Round the World With Nellie Bly from 1890, illustrated the Victorian fascination with travel and exploration, while Rival Policeman from 1896 used as its base the real-life story of a time when New York had two competing police departments.

Board games tell a lot about the culture in the United States at different times in its history from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century. 

Probably the all-time most popular game to this day is Monopoly. Originally conceived in the late 1890s under a different name as a game of the poor versus the rich, it was mostly a game with rules and game boards that players customized themselves. Sometimes they used a piece of oil cloth for the board and whatever little objects they could find for the game pieces. But it wasn’t until 1935 that Charles Darrow, a broke and out-of-work man in southeastern Pennsylvania, took the game idea, using various concepts created by players over time, and packaged it into a product that he sold through Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia. While many accounts claim Darrow as the inventor, he wasn’t. But he eventually sold the game to Parker Brothers, the largest producer of board games in America at the time, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Collectors have a lot of reasons for collecting board games, but one of the main ones is the artistic and often complicated graphics which adorn the boards and box covers. Game manufacturers lithographed the graphics onto the boards in black and white, then carefully had low-paid young women hand tint them. But by the 1880s, chromolithography made it possible to produce multicolored boards. Some were faithful images of Victorian dress and customs while others were more abstract. In either case, the game’s box cover was what sold it. And even today, if a game’s box is lost or damaged, most collectors won’t purchase it. Ironically, the absence of game pieces, cards, dice, and spinners isn’t that important, though will detract from the game’s value.

Even though manufacturers produced thousands of games, not all that many survive in good condition and even fewer in pristine condition because nearly makers used cardboard and paper to produce them. Board game and moisture are a bad combination. 

From 1880 to 1950, three companies dominated the market for board games. One of the earliest was W & S.B. Ives Company of Salem, Massachusetts. Ives developed the game with the longest name—Pope and Pagan, or the Missionary Campaign, or the Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army. Like many other late 19th-century board games, Pope and Pagan had a religious theme. Board games of the time were meant to be educational and not just for amusement. Some taught geography or simple bookkeeping or social values, such as honesty and a respect for hard work.

Two other major board game producers were McLoughlin Brothers of New York City and Parker Brothers of Salem, Massachusetts. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "folk art" in the 2023 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.