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Question:

Did kids in the 1830s make snowmen like we do?

Answer:

They did, except that they called them "snow statues." I was first asked this question several years ago at the Village, the day after a big snowfall. With eight inches of snow on the ground, some of the interpreters (the Village's people who wear costumes) wanted to build snowmen. But because we're a history museum, they needed to know whether it was historically accurate or not. They asked me to find out.

To start with, I wasn't sure. I knew that we had plenty of paintings and furniture and farm tools in our collections storage building, but I was pretty certain we didn't have any antique snowmen (or snowwomen) there. So I went to the Research Library, one of my favorite places. I looked in very old dictionaries for words like "snowball" and "snowman." I found some clues, including a poem from the 18th century that told how kids went "snowballing" -- rolling up big balls of snow and sending them crashing down a hill, and sometimes piling them up to make a figure. (They also made smaller snowballs and sometimes threw them at grown-up men with tall hats.)

Finally, I made my way to "The Boy's Book of Sports and Games" and read a description of making a "snow statue," and even found a picture of one (not a photograph, of course, but an engraving). The 1830s snow statue did not look very much like today's Frosty the Snowman. Instead of "a corncob pipe, button nose, and two eyes made out of coal," this snowperson looked like Punch, a puppet figure from the Punch-and-Judy shows that were popular entertainment for kids and adults back then. Ever since then, we've been making snow statues that look like Punch in the Village. You can try it yourself this winter.