Vigo County Historical Society

Historical Treasure Article

Historic Treasure of the Week - December 16, 1984
By Amy Mason

'Scrap' style ornaments decorated early trees

These rare, small Christmas tree ornaments from the Victorian age are still being used on the tree in the Historical Museum of the Wabash Valley, 1411 S. Sixth St.

They are small rosettes of multicolored tinsel, about two inches across, each centered with a brightly-colored paper "scrap" The shinning tinsel threads of red, green, gold and purple must have gleamed in the candlelight just as they glitter in the glow of the tree lights today.

Ornaments made of tinsel were very popular in the 1880s and 1890s. They came is a wide variety of shapes and colors. Because commercially made ornaments were not widely available until about 1870, many ornaments were hand-crafted at home.

Following the Civil War, a scrapbook craze swept the United States for about 40 years, reaching its peak in the 1890s. The inexpensive embossed, full-color pictures being printed in and imported from England and Germany, were widely collected and pasted in countless scrapbooks. So they became known as "scraps"

The Christmas trees of the 1880s and 1890s reflected this craze. Each Christmas brought a new supply of holiday sets of "scraps" to use. They were pasted on or decorated with tinsel; glued to cotton-batting shapes; even pasted with egg white on the Christmas cookies hung on the tree.

Our six small museum ornaments are centered with "scraps" depicting forget-me-nots, pansies, a basket of roses, a little girl, a little boy and a winter snow scene. Perhaps they were handmade by children.

They were used by the family of Jacob Voorhees, a cousin of Daniel Voorhees. They were given to the museum by Mrs. Gordon Reeves, the granddaughter of Jacob Voorhees.