Hoyt and Gail Griffith grabbed the brass ring years ago, and for them, the merry-go-round will never stop. Their house in Mills River is full of wooden horses and other carousel figures carved during the merry-go-round’s glory years nearly a century ago. Each dashing figure is displayed on a custom-built wooden stand whose pole supports the figure and seems to cry out for the squeals of a delighted child.
The Griffiths, serious collectors who have encyclopedic knowledge of carousels and the horses that go ‘round and ‘round, have names for each rearing, leaping steed. Owners of carousel figures — and there are a lot of them in the United States — traditionally name each creature in their magical menagerie.
“Why not?” says Gail Griffith, a tall, elegant woman. “People name their cars. People name their children.”
Endearments like these can be expensive, according to Hoyt, who retired as a film editor in New York City. “They say when you go to an auction, don’t name them,” he says, an irrepressible smile coming over his face, “because it almost forces you to win the bid.”
Sometimes the figures the Griffiths buy at auction come in pieces piled in boxes. Missing parts send Hoyt into deep research to find out how to shape and paint the needed jaw or tail. “We heard that you couldn’t hurt the value of a figure by restoring it,” says Gail. “So, our house was always coated with a very fine layer of sawdust.”
Word got around their neighborhood in New Jersey and, later, in Mills River, about their peculiar obsession. “We’d have neighbors come see us when we got new figures being unloaded from a truck,” says Gail. “They’d come to see them just like you’d come watch racehorses being unloaded.”
The Griffiths’ collection started about 1982 merely because Gail wanted to start accumulating something worth noticing.
“Some people collect owls, some people collect frogs and some people collect bears. I wanted something no one else collected,” she says. Prohibitive cost might be one reason for her passion’s marginal popularity. The first horse they saw for sale was in the early 1980s at a street antique show on Long Island, near their home. “My husband turned to me and said, ‘One day you’ll have to save enough to buy one,’” Gail recalls, laughing.
Pricey as they were, their importance as an art form wasn’t lost on the Griffiths, and eventually they flew to Oakland, Calif., to see a horse a dealer was selling. That was “Spangles,” a brilliantly carved animal painted in red, white and blue. “That’s when skies opened and angels sang,” says Gail. “And horses whinnied.”
Spangles was made about 1935 by one of the pre-eminent companies of the genre, Spillman Engineering. If a wooden horse can be said to be personable, it was Spangles, whom Hoyt describes as “very gentle-looking, kind of very happy.” What impressed him and his wife was the extent of detailed carving on the “inside” or “off” side of the horse — the side that faced the hub of the carousel, not the crowd. Carvers usually saved the detailing for the “show” or “romance” side. But Spangles had it all.
Their next figure was Ram — “like Ramses The Great, the Egyptian pharaoh,” explains Gail. Small, compact, Ram has his head lowered, as if ready to deliver a big blow. Hoyt decided Ram, made in Mexico, was tough enough to absorb the impact of the renovations he was about to inflict. He wanted to learn to refinish the figures, and he decided it was better to learn on a Mexican one, which typically aren’t as valuable or expensive as those carved in the United States.
As a popular ride, carousels started in Europe sometime in the mid-1800s. But in fact, they are older even than that. In medieval times, soldiers and gentry rode them to refine their fighting and sporting skills. Crudely made “horses” on decks spun by peasants and other beasts of burden held dukes and earls squinting to snare a ring hanging from a string.
Many of the European carvers of the Industrial Age were furniture makers and, being bound by the art traditions of the Old World, were “stodgy and rigid” in their designs, says Hoyt. Those who came to the United States were typically younger and more adventurous, bringing fresh energy and designs to the carousel-carving business. The companies that employed them were congregated in four national centers — Leavenworth, Kansas; Tonawanda, New York; Philadelphia’s Germantown area and Brooklyn’s Coney Island.
Working out of Brooklyn in the early 1900s, carvers Solomon Stein and Harry Goldstein created horses for the carousel at New York City’s Central Park. German immigrant Gustav Dentzel carved in the Philadelphia style and was one of the earliest creators of carousels, building them from the 1870s to the late 1920s. The big names that came out of the Tonawanda style were Herschell and Spillman, related families who, through the 1920s, carved in the Country Fair style. In 1911, carnival entrepreneur C.W. Parker built a factory to turn out carousels and carnival equipment in Leavenworth. “Legend has it that Dwight Eisenhower worked at Parker for a while,” reveals Gail.
There were about 4,500 wooden carousels in the United States until the Great Depression threw a monkey wrench into the works. Now there are about 100 wooden ones, including one in Shelby, North Carolina.
Most carousel figures made today are created out of durable fiberglass, tougher even than the aluminum animals that began to push the wooden ones out to pasture. With each “improvement,” carousels got further and further away from their golden era, the Griffiths believe.
“Each carver had something that made him identifiable to a collector like me — an etching in a leg or the way a tongue is cast,” says Hoyt. “Every part is beautiful. Every piece is beautiful to us.”