PAPER DOLLS

After the Trade Cards waned in popularity and were discontinued by McLaughlin's Coffee Company, Paper Dolls took their place in the one-pound packages. They were also extremely successful and were issued in more than twenty separate series, most of them as die-cut images, complete with costumes and accessories. Some dolls were to include as many as five separate pieces. They were wonderfully done and, today offer an enchanting view into the past. Their high quality make them a favorite with today's collectors.

Beautiful handcrafted (and printed) examples of paper dolls date from colonial times, some complete with pictures of social settings or historical backgrounds against which to display them. But they were expensive and beyond the reach of the average child. By the mid-1800’s, printed paper dolls were being commercially produced in quantities that made them available at affordable prices. The New York firm of McLoughlin (spelled with an “o”) Bros. was very successful in their sale prior to the Civil War, but paper dolls did not really capture the public imagination until lithographic color printing greatly improved during the 1880’s. At that same time, the popularity of trade cards had become so great that they, in turn, created the popular hobby of gluing cards into scrapbooks. Cutting the central image from a trade card so as to create a paper doll also became a common practice, so that providing the real thing was merely an obvious response to an already-expressed demand.

It did not take long for businessmen to appreciate the value of paper dolls as a means of increasing product sales. A paper doll could, for example, be put into a one pound package of coffee just as easily as had the trade card before it. With the popularity of the paper doll so well established by the 1890’s, it was a logical step for McLaughlin’s to introduce their own line of paper dolls when they discontinued the promotion of trade cards after the Columbian Exposition of 1893. So widely printed were paper dolls by the end of the century that it became common practice for many big city newspapers to print colorful dolls and accessories in their Sunday editions.

Paper dolls could not, of course, carry the extensive promotional messages found on the back of trade cards. Such a sales tool would prove successful only after the product had first established its own reputation (which McLaughlin’s coffee had clearly done by the 1890’s). But paper dolls offered the additional value of being more directly popular with children then were trade cards. It was well and good to collect trade cards and paste them into scrapbooks, but paper dolls could also easily be arranged to display a story or theme, or could be used to “play house”. For the children of poor rural families, paper dolls often represented their only opportunity to gain new toys with which to play. And as popular toys, paper dolls, even with their relatively limited advertising messages, had the advantage of remaining continuously displayed around the house, a constant reminder of which product to buy.

Like the trade cards before them, most paper doll series were strictly company product (rather than “stock” units used by other companies as well) and of the highest quality. A farm series offered dozens of animals, fourteen breeds of chickens, numerous dogs and cats in addition to its group of doll figures. Another included Mr. & Mrs. pairs of whimsical wild animals, and several showed adult figures with the latest of eastern ‘high fashion’ wardrobes. In all, they represented the slim contact between an advanced civilization in the east and the sod huts of western homesteaders.

We hope you enjoy the tasty sampling of McLaughlin’s Coffee Company’s memorabila you will find on this web site. And be sure to look for the highly detailed series of books coming soon that are written by the company’s founders grandson William F. McLaughlin. If you have any interesting information about the company or anecdotes you would like included in the books please contact Bill at:
wfmcl@embarqmail.com