Mead’s pocket box of games
Heritage Auctions (ha.com)
Worthy Amusements Pay Big
The Artifact
Mead’s Pocket-Box of Games
Condition
The box is sound and very good, just missing one end of the lid. All items stored inside are in excellent condition.
Details
In early 1862, New York City manufacturer W.S. Mead produced a “Pocket Box of Games” aimed at Union soldiers and sailors. The small box—which Mead boasted could easily be carried in either a knapsack or on “Ship and Steamer”—contained items for playing a number of popular games. There were whist counters and dice, a cribbage board, a folding polished cotton checker board with a backgammon board on the reverse side, wooden dominoes, and ¾-inch-diameter checkers accompanied by paper labels that could designate them as chess pieces. It’s unclear how troops responded to Mead’s “neat box for the pocket or knapsack,” which cost $1.50, but it is very clear soldiers’ craving for diversions was great throughout the war. As one Union infantryman described a typical day in camp, “In the tent of an evening or any time on a stump or log, checkers, chess, dominoes or cards … were the mode.”
Quotable
The New-York Daily Tribune reviewed Mead’s Pocket-Box of Games in its May 5, 1862, issue. “The war has excited ingenuity in various ways. This box, in its kind, is a striking proof of the fact. The materials of all the games played … being of full size for adult players … are here curiously compressed into the size of a pocket-volume which can literally be carried in the pocket, and hence in the knapsack; and being withal beautifully made, is fit to be placed likewise on the drawing-room table. How the traditional mock-volumes of Backgammon, the capacious Chess-case, etc., are so squeezed into a tenth of their usual size, we do not propose to show; but we think that the soldier, the traveler, and the family circle will welcome this essential, elegant novelty.”
Value
$4,182.50 (price realized at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, in 2008). “This is an absolutely superb Civil War camp display and remarkable for its fine complete condition,” noted an auction house representative at the time.
