(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved. Contact us for information about using this image.
Frances and Mary Allen of Deerfield, Massachusetts, photographed this boy playing with a hoop for an illustration for a book by Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911). The boy wears a skeleton suit, a fashion for young boys popular at the turn of the 19th century. Buttons connect the top and bottom of the suit. Rolling a hoop with a stick was a popular children's game well into the 19th century. Earle's descriptions of everyday life in the 18th century in books such as "Home Life in Colonial Days" appealed to Americans interested in rediscovering and reinterpreting the nation's colonial era. These books satisfied the American appetite for a quaint and intimate past that characterized the Colonial Revival at the turn of the 20th century.