Issue 03
STEP RIGHT UP
By Caleb NeelonPhotos By the National Carousel Archives, Museum of Carousel Art and History, Sandusky, Ohio
Illustration By Florenci0 Zavala
Carousel animals are a confusing species. They are alternately beautiful and creepy, the kind of image that can populate both a fantasy of bucolic childhood days at the park and a macabre bad dream full of clowns gone evil. At their best, in their original wood-carved forms, they are certainly some kind of art; at their worst, all garish color and chipped fiberglass, an ugly carnie fright. Unlike most of what we more easily call art, the ultimate judges of carousel animal success were children. And while woodcarving today might seem like an entirely rural pursuit (who whittles in the city?), great numbers of these carousel animals were created in and for an entirely urban setting.
Today, the wood-carved carousel animal is almost entirely a thing of the past, though one not yet irrelevant. There has been a resurging interest in American arts and crafts throughout youth-oriented urban art. Graffiti writers look back to the sign-painting traditions for cues on lettering design and composition. Many young graphic designers seek a less computer-generated feel to their work, and draw from letterpress printing and the early 20th Century styles of what is now considered clip art. Knitting is a booming practice in the female punk rock set; can quilting be far behind? Individually, these trends are fun and practical, and reliant on a handiwork that otherwise seems defunct in the age of computers. But what seems particularly compelling is that, as a whole, this source material is rooted in a time just prior to our grandparents’ eras. This makes these traditions just out of reach, and just past impossible to learn from firsthand sources. They must often be rediscovered by hand and by trial-and-error.
This fascination with a past just out of reach seems so perfectly human in a country in which so few people know their own backgrounds. It is a natural response to look for our roots and try to connect our modern ways of making art with a parentage that isn’t always obvious. This pursuit is one essentially American, as few of us have much knowledge of our scattered genealogies. These carousel animals that dominated the childhood and leisure landscapes of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries are a window into the values of a handmade era brought to a close with technology.
The idea of a wooden horse toy has been around for as long as there have been horses, wood, and children. Our word “carousel” comes from a 12th Century Arabic jousting game of horsemanship called “carosellos,” or “little wars.” The first carousel companies of note in America, however, didn’t take root until shortly after the Civil War. Of the many companies that produced carousel horses, only a few emerged as particularly influential either for their styling or their business practices. These companies often competed for the services of particular master carvers, and catered to the tastes of particular regional clienteles. The Philadelphia-style makers, the G.A. Dentzel, Muller, and Philadelphia Toboggan Company, made horses with particular attention to lifelike bodies and sensitive faces. The Coney Island-style carvers, the Charles Looff, M.C. Illions, Charles Carmel, and Stein & Goldstein companies, emphasized ornate color, trappings, and a heavy dose of inlaid jewels. Finally, there were the Country Fair-style companies, including those of “Colonel” Charles William Parker and several various incarnations of the Herschell and Spillman companies. Country Fair carvers took the carousel to every town in the nation by creating works that could easily be taken apart and loaded into boxcars or carts.
This was in contrast to the Philadelphia and Coney Island companies, which generally focused on carousels that were site-specific for particular amusement parks. Carousel animals were generally built from 2.5 inch-wide planks of basswood or poplar, which would be stacked and glued together to make larger forms such as bodies or heads. The slender limbs, manes, and so on would be made separately and then joined on to the body and head, and fastened with glue and a variety of complex joining techniques. Animals were often made on an assembly-line basis, with several carvers of varying skill levels contributing certain elements, particularly on the less visible, and therefore less elaborate, inner-row horses. Certain master carvers, however, would often create their works, especially lead horses, with very little assistance.
One such master carver was Salvatore Cernigliaro, who came to the U.S. from Italy in 1903 and took a job with the Dentzel company after saying the three English words that he knew: “Me woodcarver Ð work?” Cernigliaro, along with Charles Looff, M.C. Illions, brothers Daniel and Alfred Muller, Frank Caretta, and John Zalar (the latter two with the Philadelphia Toboggan Company), is generally regarded among the elite of the great carousel carvers. Each had their own innovations in the field. Cernigliaro, for instance, popularized the menagerie animal (with his favorites, the cat, bunny, and pig), and introduced the carving of elaborate and floral trappings Ð saddles, bridles, and so on.
Of course, not every carousel employee turned out to be a master carver. Charles W. Parker, himself a descendant of Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackaray, employed future U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who spent a teenage summer of work sanding horses at the Parker workshop in Abilene, Kansas, in 1906.
The carousel took on the American spirit of adventure and was, for an enterprising carnie few, a way to get rich. Allan Herschell packed one of his carousels onto a boat and traveled to Bombay in 1894, where he stayed for six months, operating the ride and sending back orders from a maharajah for his courtiers and a sultan who wanted to amuse his harem. Later, Herschell-Spillman carousels went off to Baku, Manila, Tokyo, Singapore, and Cape Town. In a real-life Tom Waits song, a fortune seeker named J.D. Gwin of Prairie, Indiana bought a pair of carousels and sailed with them to Tahiti, where he fueled their normally steam-driven engines with coconut husks and became wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.