Beth Neal's Paper Furniture for Dunham's Cocoanut Doll House

   ©  Kathy Duncan, 2022

As promised, this is a closer look at the Dunham's Cocoanut Doll House furniture that belonged to Beth Neal's great-aunts. They would have received an envelope of lithographed, paper furniture along with their doll house. I do love the image of these enterprising little girls, pooling their resources, to acquire their doll house. 

Notice that each piece of doll house furniture is emblazoned with the Dunham's Cocoanut logo or medallion. This is worth keeping in mind if you are ever searching through an antique shop and come across any of the pieces. My guess is that lithographed paper furniture that is missing Dunham's brand name would not be one of their pieces. 

An overview of all of the paper furniture pieces:

The bed with coverlet and lace embellished pillows. Note the Dunham's Cocoanut medallion in the headboard:

The dress and the bed would have been intended for the top-floor bedroom. Notice the hairbrush and hand mirror: 

A rocking chair for either the bedroom or sitting room. Since there was a settee that matched the rocking chair, they were probably intended for the sitting room.

This appears to be a sideboard for the dining room, complete with trays, a chafing dish, and a coffee pot or teapot. There was probably also a dining room table. 

A cast iron, wooden cook stove for the kitchen:

Also for the kitchen, a prep table, where there seems to be a pie in progress:

And finally, a washstand that might have been placed in the bedroom. Notice that the Dunham's Cocoanut brand name is on the hand towel rather than on the washstand itself: 

Interior of Beth Neal's Dunham's Cocoanut Doll House

  ©  Kathy Duncan, 2022

This post is long overdue. I am going to focus this post on the interior of Beth Neal's Dunham's Cocoanut Doll House and on the original paper furniture.

Let's start with a peek at the kitchen, which is on the ground floor:

It does not look much like modern kitchens because kitchens in 1903 consisted of freestanding furniture rather than built-ins. The lithograph shelves on the left held little lithograph packages of  Dunham's Cocoanut. 

The second floor may have been intended as a dining room: 

This is Beth's favorite room because of the moose head! I find the aquarium fascinating. I guess it held goldfish. I'm not sure what other fish would have thrived in water without an oxygen pump. It's interesting to think that people might have had such large aquariums in their homes. Even though this room has a very masculine, outdoorsy feel, the dish rack on the wall makes me think it is a dining room.

The third floor seems to be the sitting room or parlor: 

The sitting room has a much more feminine feel - from the upright piano to the frilly lace curtains.

The top floor was the bedroom:

The colors in this top-floor bedroom seem the most vibrant. The rug is especially well preserved as is the blue striped wallpaper and paintings on the wall. Notice that true to the time period, the paintings are suspended from the molding. It also looks like the upper portion of the bay window was stained glass.

The original set of paper furniture is the crowning jewel:

These pieces are in very good condition even though some bits have flaked off. Each piece of furniture bears a Dunham's Cocoanut medallion. The furniture is deserving of its own post, and I will try not to wait so long to post the next entry about them. 

Beth Neal's Dunham's Cocoanut Doll House

  ©  Kathy Duncan, 2021

When Beth Neal went looking for more information on her Dunham's Cocoanut Doll House, she found my earlier blog post about them here, and she contacted me. Beth found her dollhouse in her parent's basement. It originally belonged to Beth's great-aunts who lived in Eustis, Florida as children. Beth does not know how her aunts acquired their dollhouse. Did they pool their resources and win if from a local merchant? Was it a form of payment to their father, who owned a jewelry store in Eustis?

Beth graciously sent me pictures of her dollhouse and agreed to allow me to share them here.

As you can see, Beth's dollhouse is in very, very good condition. The lithograph colors are still vibrant and relatively undamaged. Many of these houses have worn or missing lithograph paper, color loss, water damage, or mildew. 

For this post, I would like to take you on a tour of the house. In the next posts, we will look at the individual rooms, furniture, and inhabitants of this little house.

The house itself is a four-room, four-floor construction. Like the other houses I've seen, the edges of the house are painted orange, and I wonder if this was a company color. 

The lithograph sides of the house are also in very good condition, and the windows are clearly defined. 

Right Side

Left Side

The back of the dollhouse reveals that it was made with two pieces of wood. The split in the wood accounts for the tear line in the interior lithograph paper. After looking at pictures of several other Dunham's Cocoanut Doll Houses, this seems to have happened to all of them. 

Back

The Dunham's label on the back warns the recipient that this is the back of a dollhouse and that the crate is meant to be opened from the front. 

Back Label

Both ends of the dollhouse were embossed with the Dunham label. This is the top. It shows its age and a little wear.

Top

The bottom of the dollhouse, however, is vibrant and shows little wear. It must look very much the way it did the day it arrived at the shop where it was displayed. Notice that the word Cocoanut is in orange like the front edges of the house.

Many little girls must have drolled over this house and dreamed of owning it.

Bottom

Dunham's Cocoanut Doll House - Cute As a Quill

© Kathy Duncan, 2015

I follow Christine LeFever's blog, and today she posted picture of her newly acquired dollhouse, an advertising piece for Dunham's Cocoanut. You can see pictures of Christine's dollhouse here. And you can see pictures of Tracy's dollhouse here.

After I drooled over their pictures and noodled around on google looking for information on Dunham's Cocoanut dollhouses, I discovered the same basic story everywhere: the houses were made in the 1890s as an advertising premium, but no one knows how they were distributed. Well, that's like a siren song for this girl. I should be cleaning the house, or working on a flimsy, or getting materials ready for the new school year, but NO, I decided to poke around in old newspapers looking for period information about Dunham's Cocoanut dollhouses.

Here's what I found. The only year in which the dollhouses were referenced was 1903. It looks like it was a premium that was only offered during the spring and summer of 1903. It also looks like grocers created their own rules for giving away the dollhouses. Oh, and dollhouse was two words in 1903: doll house.

Less than a handful of merchants were willing to go to the expense of including information about the dollhouses in their advertisements. It seems logical that they provided information about the giveaways in their in-store display for their regular customers and saw no need to go to the extra expense of advertising it.

The Cook Grocery, Co. in Evansville, Indiana added a small reference to the dollhouse in their July 1903 advertisement: "Dunham's Cocoanut Doll House. Have you seen it. Cute as a quill. Bring your little girl to see it." Presumably, the customer went in to see the dollhouse and learned about the giveaway rules in the store. Whatever the rules were, if the little girl also went along, then she would, of course, want the dollhouse and be eager to do whatever it took to get one.

E.M. Schreiner's Grocery Market devoted an entire advertisement to the dollhouses. Notice that there are no specifics in this giveaway. Surely, Schreiner did not have enough dollhouses to give one with each purchase, so the customer must have gotten to the store and found out there was more too it than just buying a package of shredded cocoanut and getting a dollhouse.  On average, a pound of Dunham's shredded cocoanut sold for 25 to 29 cents in 1903. Smaller packages ranged from 10 to 15 cents, with a special sale price as low as 7 cents.

Fuller and Douglass Grocers in Salem, Oregon not only devoted a full advertisement for Dunham's Cocoanut Dollhouses, but they laid out the rules for getting one. Apparently, Fuller & Douglass only had two of the dollhouses, but could have easily sold more than two crates full of cocoanut this way. This suggests that there was a limited number of dollhouses available to merchants; hence the rarity of the dollhouses today. It seems likely that Cook's Grocery in Indiana and Schreiner's Grocery in Ohio may have only had one dollhouse each. In all likelihood, they probably also gave theirs away through a similar contest, the rules of which may have suggested by Dunham's. 

Some have suggested that the dollhouses were given away by collecting premiums and mailing them in, but I saw no evidence of that. Plus, it seems impractical. Remember, the dollhouse was originally a crate designed to hold packages of shredded cocoanut. Shipping them separately as premiums does not seem very cost effective. However, there is evidence that the furniture may have been given away separately. You can see an envelope of parlor furniture here. Note that there is no date on the envelope. More importantly, this envelope was never mailed. The notation in the corner states that it was presented by John Ellis to Florence  of Cleveland, Missouri. Could he be a grocer presenting the crate and sheet of furniture to the child who won it? 

It also seems very probable to me that many of the dollhouses may have never been given away. Instead, they may have gone to the little daughters and granddaughters of the grocers. I suppose it is also possible that wealthier customers could have purchased a whole crate and received the dollhouse, but would they do that if they could afford fancier dollhouses for their daughters? I can imagine the crates being deliver to upper class households, purchasing cocoanut in bulk because they entertained on a grand scale. Those crates may have gone home with the kitchen staff. Just to insure that the public knew the grocers had the dollhouses, Dunham's included this information in their own advertisement in Good Housekeeping in 1903. The interesting bit of information here is that the printed sheet of furniture came with the dollhouse crate.

If you read the fine print in this advertisement, you can see that Dunham's offered to mail a circular describing the dollhouse along with 54 "Dainty Dessert" recipes to anyone who requested it. A "receipt" was what recipes were called in that time. I'm betting all of those recipes involved shredded cocoanut.

One reference to the dollhouse did turn up after 1903. In the Annual Report of the Hospital and Dispensary of New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, 1906, under donations received from October 1, 1905 to September 30, 1906, appeared a donation from Dunham's Mfg. Co. - 2 boxes (doll house) cocoanut. Did the giveaways continue until 1906? Or was this three year old shredded cocoanut being donated to the hospital? Given the conditions of that time period, it seems more likely that Dunham's is clearing out old stock.

Okay, that's my frippery for the day. Now to organize a notebook of workshop materials that have been gathering dust for a few weeks. I wonder, though, if I could find a copy of Dunham's circular...I wonder if it had pictures of the dollhouse...