The
Blue Santa includes his Santa sack (a double drawstring
cloth marbles bag), a card showing the original Blue
Santa’s portrait, and his story inside the card.
The Story of the Blue Santa & Friends
The Blue Santa, pictured here, was discovered at Lock 3
Park in Akron, Ohio during an archeological dig in 2001
by The American Toy Marble Museum. It was made at the
site in the mid-1890s by Samuel C. Dyke's American
Marble & Toy Manufacturing Co. (1884-2004.) This company
made the world's first to mass-produce a toys. They made
a million clay marbles a day, five-railroad box car
full, and dozens of other penny toys.
The Blue Santa, standing at 2 1/4" tall, was among the
largest penny toys they made and research identifies him
as the oldest figurine of a Santa known to exist. lie is
shown wearing a blue-hooded coat in the old German
tradition, as at the time there was a large, German
community in Akron. (The tradition of the modern Santa's
red suit and white trim, dates to 1931 with an
advertisement for the Coca-Cola Co.)
Previous to the Sam Dyke's company there were only
handmade toys; beautifully painted, clever in design and
so expensive only the world's wealthiest families could
afford to buy their children toys. With the introduction
of mass-produced toys by Sam Dyke, for the first time in
history all children could have a toy. For a penny a boy
could buy a handful of marbles.
Dyke's venture was so successful 32 other local
entrepreneurs opened up their own marble factories. On
the other side of Akron, men looking for new uses for
rubber, witness what we know today as the birth of the
'children's product market' and they turned out the
world's first mass-produced balloons, rubber balls,
rubber dollies, rubber duckies and rubber baby buggy
bumpers. To this day there've been over 170 toy
companies in greater Akron.
When archeologist digging at the site of the world's
first mass-produced toys, now Lock 3 Park (a green city
park in the heart of Downtown Akron,) discovered the
Blue Santa, they realized this was the real Santa and
Lock 3 Park was the original North Pole. It is of course
a metaphor on the benefits of mass-production, how it
came to be that all children of the world could have
toys.
The Blue Santa is still on site, hasn't left his
birthplace, and is now proudly displayed at The American
Toy Marble Museum at Lock 3 Park.
Your Blue Santa was lovingly reproduced using for
Christmas 2008. We've also reproduced; a cat, a woman's
shoe and 'unpolished chinas' (unglazed porcelain
marbles) the finest shooter marbles made in the 1800s,
all originally from Sam Dyke's marbleworks.
